Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 14:56 UTC (Wed) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867)
In reply to: Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29 by flammon
Parent article: Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

It leaves one wondering whether distributions that provide non-free kernel drivers are helping or harming Linux...

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 15:24 UTC (Wed) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link] (4 responses)

> It leaves one wondering whether distributions that provide non-free kernel >drivers are helping or harming Linux...

The problem that statement causes is that put simply the Free video drivers are not up too much in reality i dont got a choice but use the non-free binary drivers for my GeForce FX5500 as the free one is very limited . I know certain people will get their panties in a bunch over that sort of statement but to coin a phrase common in the IT world Schit Happens (and yes i do know thanks very much ) and didely squatt as well .

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 16:15 UTC (Wed) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link] (2 responses)

There's a pretty major difference between non-free drivers being installed by default (which means an end user isn't even going to realize that non-free drivers are installed, and problems will be seen as "Linux problems") versus an end user having to manually install a non-free driver in order to gain additional functionality. In the latter scenario, a user may actually realize that the lack of stability occurs after installing the non-free driver, and might therefore blame the driver (and pester the vendor to fix it).

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 16:32 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (1 responses)

Welcome to the world of Microsoft. It's all too easy to blame the OS for grief caused by 3rd-party buggy drivers (or user-space apps).

Of course, Microsoft tends to internalize this problem and fix problems themselves (according to this Raymond Chen blog post from several years ago about unsavory programming practices at a game software company).

Internalizing issues

Posted Apr 23, 2009 6:54 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

And Microsoft internalizing all driver issues is not bad at all. In fact I would say that Linux distributors might gain a lot from this practice. It is also a great opportunity now that Microsoft has managed to forget it.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 21:22 UTC (Wed) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link]

Well, there's a very good solution. Don't buy hardware that doesn't work
properly with tolerable drivers in a tolerable OS.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 15:57 UTC (Wed) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link]

It can be said that NVIDIA (indirectly) helped the development of ext4 (and by extension, ext3) due to all the crashes experienced by Ubuntu users.