LAS F22 review - summary

Fri Jun 5 08:46:44 UTC 2015

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

hi
I'm no purist, but my main beef with that review, and it's a minor
one, most of it was great is the fact that unless a proprietary driver
is a click away and it "just works" the assumption is no one will use
linux, and by extension, fedora. Fedora cannot and probably will not
ever include proprietary drivers for graphics cards and such. Firmware
is an exception, and I don't know how they manage this, but drivers
are another story. I think part of the issue is also that the nvidia
and ati proprietary drivers lag behind the latest kernel, so fedora
would have to put extra effort into keeping them working, and they
just don't want to, which I holeheartedly applaud. If you need
proprietary drivers, by all means, get them, but don't knock fedora
for not turning into ubuntu, please. Note that this is directed at the
review, not at this last email.
Thanks
Kendell clark

Enrico Tagliavini wrote:
> Hi Kendell,
> 
> well you might be lucky enough not to need proprietary drivers and 
> this add a lot of benefits both in practical terms and also in
> ethics if you believe in free software. That said if you don't
> support proprietary driver you basically cut out people from using
> Fedora. The only and main reason I don't suggest Fedora to my
> friends starting with Linux is it misses NVIDIA proprietary drivers
> support and bumblebee packages [1]. Granted there is rpmfusion for
> the drivers.... but bumblebee is another story. The repo mentioned
> in the fedora wiki is not really up to quality standard, at all.
> But I digress.
> 
> People do want their hardware to work well, if they bought Nvidia
> they want to use it and nouveau doesn't quite cut it (no offence
> meant here, but the overall experience is not up to expectation for
> the average user). Speaking for myself now: I just got a Dell
> Alienware 15. It has an nvidia optimus system. The reason why I
> choose this system is because I want to play steam games on it and
> I want to play on Linux. Intel is great, I love it and I usually
> play with Intel when it works (the driver is improving dramatically
> and a lot of stuff just works nowadays), but for some game you need
> some extra push. So I got the nvidia driver from rpmfusion applied
> a very minor adjustment to make it play nice with bumblebee, got
> bumblebee and bbswitch SRPMs from ELrepo (yes that's right) and
> recompiled for Fedora. This is easy for me, for the average user is
> impossible.
> 
> If you are a free software purist I can understand this is
> disturbing, I'm the first one being so happy when I can just use
> the Intel open source driver. But the average computer user is not
> a free software purist. Giving the user the option to use
> proprietary drivers, but sticking to open one by default, doesn't
> mean the distro is not supporting free software. It means you are
> also supporting non free software and you give you users the
> choice.
> 
> That said I do agree proprietary stuff can stay in rpmfusion. It 
> doesn't have to be in the official repo at all to be easy and 
> available. A good start would be to include rpmfusion-*-release
> RPMs in fedora official repo and possibly doing something along the
> lines of the Ubuntu additional driver tool to switch between
> available drivers.
> 
> Best regards Enrico
> 
> 
> [1] Unless I'm 100% sure they are not going to use nvidia ever and
> if it is a system I know it works well out of the box. Also note
> I'm not talking about fglrx here. I've been the maintainer of fglrx
> gentoo package for a couple of years and I know very well how 
> painful it is. It would simply harm the Fedora graphic stack given
> how slow AMD is adding support to new Xorg and kernel release. So
> I'm not in favour of providing all proprietary drivers. If open
> source packages have to fulfil quality standards, that should be
> true for proprietary drivers as well.
> 
> On 4 June 2015 at 22:53, kendell clark <coffeekingms at gmail.com>
> wrote: hi I've watched both, and the jist seems to be something on
> the order of "well, fedora is nice, but it needs to make
> proprietary bits easier because people need them." I don't think I
> quite agree with that, for all sorts of reasons. It's why I
> switched to fedora, because it sticks to it's open source
> principals. Thanks Kendell clark
> 
> 
> Michael Catanzaro wrote:
>>>> They have a follow-up review here: 
>>>> http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/8 
>>>> 3062/disjunctive-normal-fedora-lup-95/
>>>> 
>>>> I haven't watched it yet.
>>>> 
>> -- desktop mailing list desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org 
>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2
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=BUIV
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----