LAS F22 review - summary

Tue Jun 9 11:01:48 UTC 2015

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hi
I'll completely and 100 percent second this. I can't argue on whether
a given card needs open source vs proprietary drivers. What I can say
is, if the driver isn't meeting your standards and the reason is not
linux, don't blame linux. Blame the vender for being lax.
 IN fact, I'll go so far as to say that linux developers do their best
to work with what they have, and in the case of nouveau, I understand
the devs that work there have to deal with whatever scraps of
unimportant documentation nvidia throws their way, and somehow turn
that into a working driver, so it's no wonder they have trouble. I've
also heard that redhat has people actively working on improving the
state of nouveau, and when redhat throws people at a project, it
improves, quickly. No, I don't work for redhat, I've just seen the
quality of their code and some of the people that work for them.

Thanks
Kendell clark

Enrico Tagliavini wrote:
> Hi Steven,
> 
> as I said already I was the person doing the fglrx package for
> gentoo for a couple of years (and I stepped up because radeon was
> not good enough for my card), so I know the pain. And I can tell
> you this is 100% AMD fault. Long story short their main targets are
> enterprise distributions like Red Hat and SLES. They try to get
> Ubuntu as well but at the end of the day they have to ship a very
> pre release driver just for Ubuntu to get it working. They don't
> care about upstream Linux kernel and Xorg support and they don't
> care about Fedora.
> 
> This is the reason I stepped down from the fglrx package maintainer
> in gentoo. It is not that Fedora people has no love for fglrx, it
> is simply that fglrx doesn't work with up to date components. *It
> cannot start at all*. Don't call Fedora contributors or rpmfusion
> devs hater on Catalyst, they are not! It is the opposite: AMD has
> no love for Fedora and upstream Linux and Xorg. It is 100% AMD
> fault.
> 
> You can see a very different behaviour in the two main
> competitors: Intel has a serious open source driver solution,
> Nvidia is promptly supporting new upstream releases.
> 
> Crippling Fedora by shipping *unsupported* kernel releases (normal 
> kernel releases are supported for a very short time) or outdated
> Xorg packages would be a great damage to the Fedora project. As
> much as free software and open source packages should meet a
> quality standard in Fedora (for example see why Chromium is not
> available), so must proprietary stuff if that has to be included
> (via rpmfusion if this is the preferred way). Fglrx, as it is
> today, is not going to meet the requirements. Maybe the new version
> based on AMDGPU has a chance.... only time will tell.
> 
> If you want to use AMD hardware you have to use an OS supported by 
> them. Fedora is not one and this has to change AMD side first, then
> a package in rpmfusion would appear in no time I'm sure.
> 
> The text you quoted from me was not to ask for inclusion of every 
> proprietary driver, especially at the expense of the main project 
> goal. But of course software alone doesn't make a computer, if you 
> have a component better supported by proprietary drivers where the 
> open source one is missing or falling short (your point about your 
> laptop aging out is very valid, and very frustrating process) I
> think the proprietary option should be available with a reasonably
> low effort for a normal user (not an advanced user). So my point
> was not to add more proprietary drivers into rpmfusion (well not
> necessarily), but to make it a little bit easier for the end user.
> 
> Best regards
> 
> On 8 June 2015 at 19:13, Steven Rosenberg
> <stevenhrosenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 1:41 AM, Enrico Tagliavini 
>> <enrico.tagliavini at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> RPM Fusion support for Nvidia seems OK, but support for
>> Catalyst/fglrx has been nonexistent in Fedora 20-22.
>> 
>> My hardware (2013 HP laptop) eventually "aged out" of needing 
>> fglrx/Catalyst, and running the open Radeon is less trouble, for
>> sure. But for new hardware, it's sure nice to have Catalyst (and
>> I presume Nvidia) around and packaged.
>> 
>> But I've accepted that the Fedora Project doesn't want
>> proprietary graphics drivers in its archive, and would really
>> (really, really) prefer that its users refrain from using them.
>> 
>> Even when packaged by RPM Fusion, the Catalyst driver is a pain
>> to use in Fedora because the kernel is updating so frequently.
>> Installing it from upstream is even worse.
>> 
>> Luckily Radeon driver and Linux kernel development moves so fast
>> that after a year I was able to successfully run w/o Catalyst.
>> But that first year was hell.
>> 
>> I've been running Fedora on this laptop since F18 because it was
>> the best on this hardware at the time, and I love Fedora. But if
>> Catalyst was important to me, I'd be looking elsewhere (CentOS,
>> Debian, Ubuntu ...).
>> 
>> While Fedora is plenty stable overall, it's not so stable when
>> running Catalyst because AMD is so far behind and Fedora is
>> moving so quickly, so for those reasons -- plus Radeon's great
>> strides in recent years -- I don't miss it.
>> 
>> But there is no love for Catalyst among Fedora contributors, or
>> somebody would be packaging it for RPM Fusion.
>> 
>> -- Steven Rosenberg http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog 
>> http://blogs.dailynews.com/click
>> 
>> 
>> -- desktop mailing list desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org 
>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
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