On Thursday 17 December 2009 01:41:07 Kevin Kofler wrote: > Linuxguy123 wrote: > > The other thing that bugs we is that we are constantly (since F10) in no > > man's land. Nouveau isn't finished and totally working yet. In fact, > > Fedora people weren't keen about Linux merging it in 2.6.33 ! And yet > > the KDE developers keep writing stuff that doesn't work with the > > proprietary nvidia driver. > > > > If the Fedora/KDE community wants to force us to use nouveau then they > > need to complete it, ie clean up all the bugs and build a GUI that > > allows one to control it like nvidia has done. I'd GLADLY use nouveau > > then. > > > > UNTIL then we have to realize we live in a TWO driver community. Some > > of use still need to use the proprietary nvidia driver. > > You don't NEED to use the proprietary driver, you just need to buy > supported hardware. The intel and radeon drivers are both more advanced > than the Nouveau driver, thanks to Intel and AMD/ATI providing specs, and > Intel even developing a Free as in speech driver themselves. Buying NVidia > hardware gives money to a company which doesn't support Free Software and > leaves you in the messy situation you describe, it's just a plain bad > idea. Nevertheless, as far as I know, NVidia cards under Linux is the only available option for my needs at work: I need a crunching 3D OpenGL that can eat lots of triangles. When I had a look last time (January 2009), NVidia proprietary drivers seemed to be the best option, on the performances side. ATI drivers were not supporting recent 3D cards, and Intel 3D performances were a joke. Maybe it has changed recently. I hope so! As far as openness matters, Intel seems to be the best open source support, but AFAIK the Intel developers are not giving specs of Intel cards: they only gives open source drivers, and third-part developers have difficulties to fix bugs in Intel drivers. That is not that good. ATI gives specifications, but the open source community does not seem to have enough man power to give good 3D drivers for recent cards. I dream of a manufacturer who would gives the specs *and* provides man power to implement open source drivers... -- Laurent Rineau, PhD R&D Engineer at GeometryFactory http://www.geometryfactory.com/ Release Manager of the CGAL Project http://www.cgal.org/
