Remember, we're talking about ONE driver. One driver which does not fit the development model of Linux. On Sun, Oct 30, 2005 at 10:18:17PM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: [Re: Kernel API] > Freeze the thing and give up. No thanks. For all but ONE driver that I use, which the Linux kernel developers did not write and don't support, the Linux kernel has proven far more stable than Windows for the last 10 years on every system I've used them both on. I'm quite satisfied with the development model. For this one specific case (the nvidia driver), I would prefer that the vendors cave, or else for things to remain as they are. I'm quite happy that Linux has the development model it does, because for the last ten years, my experience has been that while all my colleagues and friends and family members who stick steadfastly to their Windows OSes curse their machines for crashing in the middle of important work they were doing, I keep right on going, doing whatever it was I was doing, with narry a complaint... ;-) If it means that I need to be careful about which version of the damned proprietary NVidia drivers I install, because version X crashes my system, but Y doesn't (at least only sometimes, and not until I try to shut the system down), I can live with that. It's just one driver. If I eventually get really annoyed, I can just use the Xorg driver (which I have used extensively in the past, and which has never crashed my system)... I don't really NEED the extra performance, though I admit it's nice to have... Open-source code (in general) IS better than proprietary, not because of ideology, but simply because a lot more people are looking at the code, and those people are doing it not just for pay (or not for pay at all), but because they just love doing it. It's a labor of love... Commercial vendors just simply can't compete with that. Free code is better in practice, because it just can't help but be. My 10 years of managing both Windows systems and Linux systems professionally have proven that out; Windows crashes a lot (less so today, but even still, it does) and Linux doesn't [with certain well-understood exceptions involving drivers that are highly experimental or still under heavy active development -- or proprietary drivers like this one, which break the model]. You can say I've drank too much GPL kool-aid all you like; I've watched the development of both Linux and Windows very closely -- it's just a fact that Linux is generally more stable than Windows, and has been since the 0.something days. It's funny that, even with constant development, and constantly changing Kernel APIs, Linux has been much more stable than Windows since forever. While Windows HAS improved a lot in the last 5 years or so, from the standpoint of stability (and other ways as well) it's been playing catch-up with Linux since there was Linux. You have to ask yourself why that is, given that Microsoft has been around a lot longer... My conclusion is that their development model, with their fixed APIs, which you claim is better, simply isn't. I actually had a lot more to say to rebutt your specific points, but I've decided that it's a waste of time to pursue this; you're entitled to your opinion, even if you are wrong... ;-) People never believe me when I tell them I was once a big fan of Windows... I was though. Thankfully, I've learned a lot since then. That said, should Fedora provide some automatic means of getting the latest NVidia driver which is compatible with your system? Yeah, they probably should. But don't blame that shortcoming on Linux; blame it on the Fedora developers. Even still, it would be better to have the driver natively included in the kernel, and I don't really see how you can argue otherwise. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
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