Why people are not switching to Fedora

Lars Seipel lars.seipel at gmail.com
Tue May 12 00:16:38 UTC 2015


On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 03:34:20PM -0400, Christian Schaller wrote:
> I haven't used the NVidia binary drivers in a few years, but back when I did
> it wasn't that much of a pain. I used one of the 3rd party rpms with the driver
> in it and while it was usually a little bit of time between a new Fedora kernel
> and the NVidia driver getting rebuilt, it was never a real issue. I just kept
> booting with the old kernel until the driver got updated. 
> 
> So to me the only thing that would be needed to make this a bit smoother is maybe
> some way for Grub or similar to be aware of your situation and unless there are major
> security issues maybe suggest you keep booting with the old kernel for a bit?

That's not necessary, I think. The packaged nvidia blobs from the major
3rd party repo also come in a variant (called akmod) that doesn't
require you to wait for rebuilds of the module to appear in the repo.
Instead, it builds the kmod rpm on the fly when booting a new kernel (or
was it on install?). As the kernel-specific part (shipped as source
code) is just a thin wrapper, the time it takes to build it is hardly
noticable. Obviously, it requires GCC but that shouldn't be an issue
considering the current lax to non-existing size constraints of our
graphical spins.

Ubuntu is using that approach as well (or at least they used to, no idea
what they're doing today). It tends to be much more robust in face of
kernel updates, as in most cases a simple rebuild is all that's needed.

The repo's nvidia howto recommends the akmod variant. Many results of a
random google query probably don't.


More information about the desktop mailing list