FC4 does not work, "out of the box" for me; GUI/X11 fails

[Derek Martin]

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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