F12: 30 second freeze when accessing certain panel items ?

[Kevin Kofler]

Linuxguy123 wrote:
> One other thing bothers me about knocking people for using the
> proprietary nVidia driver: nVidia didn't thumb their nose at Linux.

They did, by refusing to release a Free Software driver or even to provide 
specs to developers willing to write their own.

> Sure, we now have nouveau.  But for a long time we didn't.  And luckily
> for us, nVidia provided us with a Linux driver.  No, it wasn't perfect.
> And it wasn't open source.  And the build/install process was... err...
> 
> But it worked !  It allowed us to run Linux on machines with nVidia
> hardware in ways that we wouldn't otherwise been able to.  I could
> mention many, many other hardware vendors that didn't do this much !

Not releasing any driver would actually have been much better, as releasing 
a proprietary driver removes much of the motivation to write a Free one (due 
to people like you only thinking of the short-term gains and not willing to 
work on improving the situation, even if they have the required skills). 
Nouveau would be much more advanced by now if the proprietary driver didn't 
exist.

> And furthermore, they aren't hindering the nouveau process.

Only because they have no way to hinder it (other than by demotivating those 
developers who don't care about freedom by continuing support for their 
proprietary driver, which they do).

> I know they aren't actively helping it, but you have to remember how
> competitive the graphics card industry is and some of their advantage
> might be the IP in the driver.  You can't blame them for keeping that
> secret.

Yet both of their major competitors released specs, and one of them (Intel) 
employs several people to be the primary developers of a Free driver, the 
other (AMD's ATI division) at least participates in the efforts to write a 
Free driver with at least one full-time employee. NVidia is the odd one out.

> Its not like they are promoting a vendor lock in situation.

LOL, what about those proprietary APIs like CUDA? How's that not lock-in?

> I see that nVidia has just released 190-53 and that it appears to
> address some Linux specific concerns.

… and demotivate some more people from working on Nouveau. :-(

Thankfully, some people who actually care about freedom are actively working 
on Nouveau no matter what NVidia does. But they would be many more if the 
proprietary driver didn't exist. An actively-maintained proprietary driver 
is not a good thing at all.

        Kevin Kofler