Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Bill Crawford]

2008/5/21 Christopher Stone <chris.stone at gmail.com>:

> I *have* looked at the smolt stats, and they don't make any sense at
> all.  1.6% and 1.9%, that doesn't make any sense, the smolt stats have
> to be wrong.  I'm sure the total number of nVidia and ATI fedora
> desktop users is more than 4%.

That is less surprising than you might think.

All but a handful of the >100 machines in this building shipped with
SiS onboard video. A number of us have *added* ATI graphics (in the
form of an outdated but well supported PCI Radeon 9250).

These cards have been quite well supported (with 3D) for a long, long
time. For none of that time has *any* nVidia hardware had a stable,
supported "open source" 3D driver. The ATI card has, and it was
enabled by ATI providing specs to developers, albeit I am given to
understand (correct me if I'm wrong) under an NDA that could not be
transferred to others once some of the original developers moved on to
other projects.

So, to sum up the actual *evidence* in this thread so far:

The new X.org server has a new ABI. It isn't going to change when the
"magical fairy dust" of the "1.5" version number is applied.

Due to his modesty, ajax has not loudly trumpeted the fact he's the
one who gets to decide when it's done this time around; if he says
version 1.4.1.5.9.26.535.89.79.323846 is ready to ship, it's ready to
ship.

The (open source) ATI drivers are working, with the new server,
because they're a part of the distribution, and one or two people
posting on this thread have been involved in updating those drivers to
work with the new ABI (and significant new development, too). This was
possible because they are, well, open source.

The (closed source) nVidia drivers are not.

I don't know the status of the closed source ATI drivers, and I don't
care too much, because I don't need to use them. However AMD,
including one of the developers who works on the open source drivers,
is working hard to make open source drivers work for newer cards, and
it would appear a lot of progress has been made.

This is not to mention Intel (I don't have any Intel graphics here,
and I don't think I've ever used any; I've had Cirrus Logic, Savage,
Matrox, and several ATI cards including Mach64 of various vintages as
well as my current Radeons). The last nVidia hardware I used was a
TNT2 in a Dell machine a few jobs back, and that was running NT.

Please, stop wingeing and look at the "facts on the ground" as my
manager would say :o)