On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 07:40, Mike Hearn wrote: > On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 16:29:12 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote: > Sometimes the choice is like this. > I bought a 3D game. I want to play it. > a) Go back to Windows > b) Use a binary driver on Linux Well I haven't used windows for years and don't plan on starting up again. I also will not allow a binary-only module in my kernel.
Exactly my position - I'm not a kernel developer by any stretch of the imagination and I won't pretend to know whether or not the Linux Kernel should be done differently, but I am not ever buying a video card again that does not have a kernel 3D driver.
My VooDoo3 cards just worked. I was happy. They don't work with my current mobo, so I bought an NVidia card.
I'm using the open source nv.o driver because NVidia's binary driver didn't always work properly even for 2D stuff. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't.
Sometimes a newer driver from nvidia worked better, sometimes it didn't.
Maybe I wouldn't have to worry about that if Linux did things the way things were suggested here, I don't know - but I do know is that my experience is that hardware with OSS drivers in the kernel almost always just plain work, and when they don't just plain work - like what happened with my FireWire driver - it is quickly fixed by people who work on the kernel every single day.
I don't mind closed source software. I use divx4linux on my system right now - but divx4linux isn't going to bring the system down if it fails, it is user space.
I think I'm with the kernel people on this one just because I have seen that their method DOES provide quality drivers, I have not seen the closed source method provide quality drivers.
Upgrading to WinXP SP2 gave me problems with some drivers, for example - as did every OS 7/8/9/X update I ever did.
