Interested in helping improve the Fedora desktop experience?

[Colin Walters]

2009/10/21 Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org>:
>
> Hardware incompatibility is a fact of life for that, and that's okay. I
> don't think we should wait until the end of time for those issues to be
> sorted out. But if we know Nvidia cards tend to cause a bad experience,
> couldn't we have detected the card early on, and maybe presented some
> kind of, 'Hey, you've got this piece of hardware. It might cause you
> some issues. You might want to check this wiki page (or whatever) for a
> list of common problems and workarounds for this card. Sorry that this
> had to make your experience with us a little bumpy, but let's get you
> around it!'

Well...it's tricky because this stuff changes so rapidly, and we may
simply not know how well a particular card works with a particular
version of the driver.  Then of course multiply that matrix by
configuration like multihead...

I guess a lot comes down to the details.  Are we just special casing
PCI vendor == nvidia?  Or something more elaborate?

Graphics is especially tricky, because linking to a wiki page is
obviously problematic if the driver is failing entirely, since you
wouldn't be able to see our error page...

In the end graphics just has to work.  I think we should spend time on
big picture issues that impact all users (e.g. root password, upgrade
experience); there's a lot of great work going on by all accounts in
the nouveau driver, and it's likely F12 would work better for him
already.

> Same with the anaconda crashes he was having in the partitioning screen.
> Apparently it was a known issue:
>
>
>
> How could we expect him to know to even look for the known issues wiki
> page? How would he know it existed?

This one is much more targeted would probably be fairly easy to do.
Doesn't anaconda already have a crash handler that submits to
bugzilla?  We'd just need a link on the bugzilla page for anaconda to
its common bugs list in the wiki.