[BLUG] About the article

[Simon Ruiz]

I was not aware that Mandriva had a competing project to Compiz and Beryl. Interesting.
 
I agree that if end-users aren't educated about the non-free driver problems, they're not going to complain, and without end-user complaints nothing will change. The flip side of that is, of course, if we don't support the hardware people have already bought they aren't going to become end-users. Without end-users, we won't have the leverage to ask for anything, we're statistical noise.
 
I know one thing, if Intel jumps into the non-integrated video card market and maintains it's open-source driver status, they'll have a pretty big market on lock-down. I'd like to think Linux users will vote with their wallets if given good clear choices. The FSF is building a list of supported software at http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw
 
I myself am among those who go and enable those drivers anyways, as are most people I know, so I obviously don't feel it's wrong to do so (I paid for the hardware before I knew the problems, but that doesn't mean I didn't already pay for it and want it to work if at all possible). It's strange how it being a default makes the ethics debate that much more explosive.
 
I'd be comfortable if they just had a little prompt that said "Hey, you have an nVidia card! We can make it work with this spiffy bling thing, but we'd have to install proprietary drivers. Proprietary drivers suck a lot and go against the spirit of free software, for more information check out: <hyperlink>. Do you want to do it anyways?". I don't know whether they'll decide to prompt the user at install time, though; I haven't played with the Feisty alphas since I've been working on getting Edgy to run well and I don't exactly have my computer to play with, I just know it's the default to enable the proprietary binary drivers if needed.
 
I wonder if the OLPC wireless bits can be adapted for laptop and desktop use...
 
Cheers,
 
Sim?n
 
 
 

________________________________

From: blug-admin_at_cs.indiana.edu on behalf of Michel Salim
Sent: Fri 1/26/2007 1:31 PM
To: blug_at_cs.indiana.edu
Subject: Re: [BLUG] About the article



Going off on a tangent here, but has anyone tried Mandriva's Metisse? It
seems to me to be more practical than Compiz/Beryl.


The other argument is that if you make it too easy for end-users they
would never press for better cooperation from hardware vendors. Does
Ubuntu require explicitly enabling non-free drivers (perhaps prompting
the user to do so at install time)?

Myself, the experience of wrestling with flaky ATi and Broadcomm chips
on my previous laptop made me pick a more Linux-friendly solution this
time (the only sticking point is the ipw3945 wireless driver, which
depends on a non-libre userland daemon). If more Linux users vote with
their wallet we might have more of a say.

Then again, we probably would have to wait for an OLPC-esque laptop to
be released targeting the average laptop user for things to change. A
vertically integrated solution, ala Apple harware + software.

--
Michel


_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG_at_linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug