Lonni J Friedman wrote:
For the sort of thing open source can provide even without actually
"fixing" a bug myself, see:
http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley/easy-linux.html
Of course, those are many great examples of the benefits of open
source. It certainly doesn't change the fact that open source bugs
don't necessarily get fixed any faster than closed source bugs.
It is a lot better to not have to go out and update drivers for every
kernel release. Personally, I choose open code and specs.
You do have a point that neither bugs experienced in vendor only
supported drivers and openly available code and known specifications
ensures someone or group will fix the problem.
The point here is that someone claimed that going with the open source
intel drivers means that someone would get better support. That claim
is silly because 'support' is a rather vague concept, and my idea of
support likely differs from someone else's.
I liked the times that I needed to try and work with developers through
submitting bug reports and testing their proposed solutions. Neither
upstream developers or RedHat developers seemed to outwardly make one
feel inferior due to my lesser knowledge of the problems. It was a
learning experience and the bugs were removed from the Intel driver
source code once found. With closed source drivers it becomes an
expedition to find a suitable driver to run hardware in a suitable
manner. Since Linux distributions vary enough with compilers used and
their frequency of updates, an open driver which the code can be updated
and compiled for optimum performance would sell more hardware in my
view. Of course the sales for closed drivers for hardware probably has
less impact than I would expect.
I am using a laptop with a radeon card which has some 3D support for the
particular chipset. The computer with the NVidia card has only 2D with
the open nv driver. So I would suggest Intel, then radeon, then maybe
NVidia. SIS, MGA and S3 for 3D support I am not sure of how well they
work, if at all. I only tried 2D on those machines to date.
Jim
--
Your picture of the world often changes just before you get it into focus.
