Derek Martin wrote:
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.
I don't have any crashes with the nVidia drivers. My uptimes are
based on kernel update releases plus a few weeks (I am slow to reboot).
I do agree that if more people have access to the code, things should
only get better.
--
Robin Laing
