Devils are in the details [LWN.net]

Devils are in the details

Posted Mar 2, 2011 13:16 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: Devils are in the details by drag
Parent article: An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

> It's really bad form for applications developers to be forced to hack around Linux being shitty. It's better just to fix Linux and application developers can concentrate on using the APIs that are most appropriate for what they want to do.

Currently that means using proprietary graphics drivers for many people, which is something a lot of Linux users don't feel comfortable with. As far as I can see, the Nouveau people and their colleagues are putting in a heroic effort to "fix" their bits of Linux, but it is hard for them to promise anything on a predictable time scale.

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Devils are in the details

Posted Mar 2, 2011 13:19 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

With just open source drivers (including Nouveau) in Fedora 15 branch, GNOME Shell seems to be work surprising well on most hardware. So I would say, we are almost there already.

Devils are in the details

Posted Mar 2, 2011 14:14 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (2 responses)

> With just open source drivers (including Nouveau) in Fedora 15 branch, GNOME Shell seems to be work surprising well on most hardware. So I would say, we are almost there already.

The Nouveau people are still very cautious regarding their 3D support, and warn people not to use it on production systems. Of course delivering more than they promise is much better than promising things and not delivering...

Devils are in the details

Posted Mar 2, 2011 16:34 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I am surprised by the Gallium drivers at this stage in the game. I can't speak for Nvidia, but the AMD stuff for 57xx hardware has worked out great for me (when using xorg-edgers PPA for Ubuntu and 2.6.38)

It's actually faster then the older more traditional DRI drivers already.

I am cautiously optimistic that we have reached a similar situation with graphics that we saw with wifi... were the introduction of mac80211 protocol stack actually provided the basis for making it easier to write great working drivers for the majority of the hardware.

Devils are in the details

Posted Mar 3, 2011 9:46 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Red Hat has Ben Skeggs, one of the primary developers of Nouveau and Fedora benefits a lot from that expertise and can afford to be ahead in bug fixes and sometimes features.