Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Posted Nov 5, 2010 13:31 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501)
In reply to: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland by marineam
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

On the flip side though, none of this applies to things still using the traditional driver-in-X model such as proprietary drivers and all the odds and ends that aren't Intel, nVidia, and ATI. Keith's answer was basically that Nouveau is doing well which covers the last proprietary driver and as for the others all he had was "I don't know."

That's a very 'desktop' view of the world.

ARM is rapdily becoming a platform that matters for shiny graphics use and we have a choice of GPUs: Imagination Tech PowerVR, ARM Mali, Nvidia GeForce, and Broadcom BCM2727(?).

Guess how many of those have free drivers? Exactly zero. So just as we get to a reasonable state on the desktop we have the same old mess all over again for new netbooks, tablets, phones, TVs and general widgetry. Suggesting that this problem has been dealt with is a very long way off the mark - it's about to get a whole pile worse.

Do please heckle at every opportunity you get at conferences, product unveilings, design meetings and so on. The people who matter need to hear over and over that that is going to be a massive PITA and that they need to fix it, as it is being fixed on the desktop. The engineers already know this, but there are lawyers and execs who still don't get it and are afeared of everyone's patents. I'm doing my bit here at ARM every time they come to tell us how cool it all is. I tell them it stinks :-)

Pretending we don't have a big problem does no-one any good. And unfortunately whilst we have 4 choices all with the same problem we have limited leverage: we can't pick the good choice because there isn't one. I we can get one manufacturer to open up then the others are likely to follow, as has happened reasonably convincingly on the desktop.

---

to post comments