On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 01:21:15PM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > > I sort > > of like the idea of having users take the extra efforts to get the > > binary only software installed so they at least recognize that there is > > a distinction. > > Yes, especially if they notice that the distinction is that the people > who build the hardware do a better job of writing the drivers. They often don't though. That's the problem, and it's been proven out throughout the history of Linux. Intel took over the maintenance of the ether pro 100 driver. What happened? Tranceiver lock-ups when the card got busy. Adaptec took over maintenance of the AIC7xxx drivers for Linux. What happened? CRASH. And the proprietary NVidia drivers are widely known to crash systems... even with kernels that they used to develop and test the driver on. Granted, the XFree/Xorg drivers lack the performance and some of the features of the proprietary driver, but they also don't crash my system. AFAIK, the same is true of the other OSS drivers, including the DRI ones. The only reason the OSS NVidia driver isn't better than the proprietary one is because the vendor won't release the specs to code the thing. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
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