F12 comments and questions

[Rodd Clarkson]

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 17:13 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-10-15 at 10:47 +1100, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> > Hands up anyone
> > who thinks it matters that <their favorite application> has a bug, if
> > they can't get X running to use <their favorite application>. 
> 
> The problem is that bugs in X tend to be device-specific (and hence only
> affect people who are unfortunate enough to own that exact device), but
> bugs in, say, Firefox affect everybody.

I don't know if Firefox works or not ;-]

But I get that X is complex, I'm just saying that it would be great if
more resources could be put into making the core system work (which
would 'free up' more 'affected' people to find other issues and address
them.)

> The other issue is that the developers of, say, Firefox know crap all
> about fixing bugs in X. And vice versa. Coders aren't interchangeable
> resources, you don't just pick them at random and point them at
> problems. (Well, some people do. This appears to be how Windows is
> developed...) Even more specifically...Ben Skeggs (whose area of
> expertise is nouveau) might be able to fix basic bugs in radeon, but
> probably nothing complex. Not, at least, without a lot of extra
> training, during which time no-one's fixing bugs in nouveau.

I also get that it's very complex, but to be honest, as someone who has
had a series of sub-par performances on a variety of laptops due to pour
chipset support, I'd really like to see Redhat/Fedora putting a bunch of
effort into this area for a release cycle and getting things a whole
bunch better.  Having graphics that just works is a big win for
everyone.

The best graphics experience I've had with Linux (which for me is Fedora
and Centos) has been using the proprietary nvidia driver (and that has a
times sucked badly too).  And while I'm willing to go without 3D support
on my work desktop, basics like having a stable desktop, and having
suspend/resume support aren't in my opinion small issues to be ignored.
Ironically, I chose my current laptop (with it's ATI chipset) because I
thought the ATI support was supposed to be reasonable and because I
admired Fedora stance on free software and avoiding unsupported,
proprietary drivers.  (I now recommend people using nvidia and and
proprietary drivers, or intel if they have to and avoid ATI all
together)


R.
> 
> -- 
> Adam Williamson
> Fedora QA Community Monkey
> IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
> http://www.happyassassin.net
>