Why people are not switching to Fedora

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:07 AM, Alex G.S. <alxgrtnstrngl at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm planning on working on this when we're further into the Wayland
>> transition,
>> as I feel that any work on X11 would be soon wasted, and I don't want to
>> set my Optimus horses before the Wayland cart is ready.
>
>
> Having the FOSS and proprietary drivers be mutually exclusive creates a
> scenario where a user get's the worst of two experiences.
>
> The proprietary and FOSS drivers should be able to be installed at the same
> time and loaded when needed depending on the use-case.  Ideally the user
> should default to the FOSS driver and run a GNOME Wayland session.  When
> they play a game from Steam the proprietary drivers should be dynamically
> loaded as an isolated X11 session similar to what XWayland does today. The
> user should also be able to run apps with the proprietary driver if they
> wish but the overall desktop should be managed by the FOSS drivers.

This is technically impossible to do, because the kernel only allows
one driver to drive a piece of hardware.  Even if we rearchitected the
kernel to allow multiple drivers in a co-operative manner, it still
wouldn't be possible unless the proprietary drivers were modified to
do this hand-off.  The only way to achieve what you are suggesting is
to unload a FOSS driver and load a proprietary driver when you started
e.g. Steam.  Then do the opposite when you exit the game.  That is
basically a tear-down of everything and you might as well reboot.

The idea is nice, but it isn't feasible at all.  We have a better
chance of just making the FOSS drivers as performant as the
proprietary drivers.  At least that is somewhat realistic.

josh