Nouveau problem in F-16

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2011-11-24 at 14:41 -0500, ergodic wrote:
> Regardless there is something that changed from F-15 to F-16.  F-15
> runs with no problem.

Well...yes. Lots of things change. Otherwise there'd be no point doing a
new release. mesa, the kernel, and the X server all got major updates.

> It would be interesting to know how many potential users were turned
> away by an installation that fails during the first boot.

Interesting, also impossible. The answer for any distribution release is
'some'. Given the sheer amount of hardware out there it is inconceivable
that any distribution ever released has booted properly on all of it.

> Just for the sake of a test I installed Ubuntu 11.10 with no problems.
> It worked right out.

That doesn't really surprise me at all. There are significant
differences in the versions of the relevant components included in
Ubuntu and Fedora. They are using older versions of everything, compared
to F16.

> As I mentioned,  I have been using Fedora since version 3.  Maybe
> because of the greater program complexity or whatever, there is a need
> to raise the standards.

It's impossible to conclude this from a single anecdotal instance of
'this release does not boot on my system'. As I said, it's perfectly
well known to anyone who does QA or support that there will be hardware
which just doesn't work with any given distribution release, and the
exact set of hardware which doesn't work is different for every release.
Given the fact that this is the case, and it's practically impossible to
change it, a single anecdotal instance of 'this hardware works with F15
but does not work with F16' tells us nothing meaningful. It is not
possible to reliably draw the conclusion 'the quality of F16 is lower
than the quality of F15' from such data. It's really just something that
happens.

I'll bet you gold rings to rocks that there is hardware that works with
F16 and doesn't work with F15, and that there was hardware which worked
with F14 but not F15, or hardware which worked with F15 but not
F14...it's just...how things go.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net