Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware) [LWN.net]

Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware)

Posted Mar 26, 2012 22:42 UTC (Mon) by marcel.oliver (subscriber, #5441)
In reply to: Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware) by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed (Tom's Hardware)

It appears to be a very hard problem. There are reports on bugzilla (including one filed by me) and it's finally been made a blocker bug for F17 (which means that the cards are likely to simply end up black-listed):

I still don't understand why Gnome developers argue so aggressively against providing a fallback (!) version of Gnome which is identically featured except for the eye-candy and can run without accelerated graphics hardware. The driver problem on Linux is not going away all of a sudden and while on Nvidia it appears to affect only somewhat older (but for desktop purposes completely adequate) graphics cards, there is no guarantee that it won't randomly affect very new hardware for unpredictable periods of time, driver updates which might have regressions, or non-standard configurations of whatever sort.

I believe, at least I can say that for myself, that the willingness to relearn workflow, for what it's worth, would be much greater if I had confidence that the new workflow would actually work consistently across the hardware I own (which it does not).

There are many reasons why people would not want to change/upgrade their hardware. It's often not just the money, but the idea to that developers seriously require users to fiddle with a perfectly good system (by changing hardware or going out and installing proprietary drivers which break at the next Fedora kernel upgrade) just to use the out-of-the-box default of current Fedora leaves a bitter taste.

I am very much hoping that Fedora gets Software rendering working in an acceptable way, but what I can find on the net on the progress does not sound too encouraging.

Whatever the merits of the new Gnome experience, so little regard for hardware compatibility does not seem a very wise move.

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