But come on, Ubuntu. Nouveau by default? It makes Xorg suck 75% of my CPU just to display a youtube video. And since my hardware x264 decoders are idle since, oops, that's not supported either, I need some CPU left over to decode the dang thing!
Ubuntu cannot fix or improve these drivers. However, they are already so much better than the ones we can fix and improve that if you don't enable them you're just going to spew a whole boatload of extra CO2 to the atmosphere for no good reason other than to enjoy your free software righteousness. Does it feel good? And honestly, since you're not very likely to get better help or support if you run into problems with the open source drivers, it's only about the righteousness. We have principles, damnit!
(I love Ubuntu, I really do. Everyone who works on it is providing a fantastic service and I don't mean them any ill-will at all. It's just that this dialog is too ironic not to comment on.)
As an Ubuntu developer and community member, I've seen far too many people post "ZOMG NVIDIA DRIVERS SUCK" "MAI ATI IS BROKEN", and send these as bug reports.
ReplyDeleteWhen we say it's not our software and we can't patch it they start going on about how Ubuntu is F/OSS, and how it's in our repositories
That warning is there to make people know for absolutely that they have nonfree software that they can't whine about on their box.
Don't like it? You can make your own Locale and "translate" that blurb into something else. Why? Because it's F/OSS.
You can install the nvidia ones. Better be free by default, there's the "hardware drivers" (jockey-gtk) application to fix that.
ReplyDeleteBefore, the default was nv driver, noveau is way better than nv.
Can't agree with you more. At least on my computer with a an older GeForce4 MX440 nVidia card, Nouveau simply sucks. I don't use Ubuntu normally, but installed Linux Mint 10 on a partition so I could more easily remotely support my father who uses Linux Mint 8. When I installed Linux Mint 8 (his computer has the same video card) a nVidia proprietary notice popped up that allowed me to download and install the drivers that actually work. Linux Mint 10 has Nouveau drilled into the kernel so deeply that I had to blacklist it in Grub before I could install nVidia's proprietary drivers. Without the proprietary nVidia drivers, I can't hardly play a video from Youtube, much less full screen on Hulu. How did anyone get the idea that the Nouveau driver was "good enough?" It may be slightly better than the nv driver -- but at least I could install over that without blacklisting.
ReplyDeleteIts worse with Fedora. On Fedora, if you happen to have a problem with an open source driver, there is no handy Proprietary Driver install application included. I had to go through a bunch of config files, and terminal commands (even blacklisting Nouveau in the GRUB config) just to get the nVidia proprietary drivers working.
ReplyDeleteAside from nouveau being next to impossible to use, or even install, the developers are openly hostile and unwilling to help any users. Quote from their wiki:
ReplyDelete"Do not report build or compilation failures. Those failures are either your own mistake, or they will be noticed soon anyway. You should follow TroubleShooting, most likely you have an outdated libdrm or kernel.
The developers are not interested to help you with installing the 3D drivers. Your fellow users on the other hand might. Notice, that the irc-channel #nouveau in Freenode is supposed to be a developer channel, so asking there will annoy people."
Reading those 2 paragraphs makes me realize that I'd rather sacrifice freedom in this particular case than support these vicious nouveau people. Would I rather beg NVIDIA for support, or these antisocial hackers?
I'd also rather sacrifice a F/OSS driver to get a proprietary driver -- by the same people who made the hardware and know better than anyone else IN THE WORLD how to support it -- that works 100% and works correctly. I'm all for F/OSS, and I wish nouveau well, I really do, however, making it -- in its admittedly and unarguably broken state -- the default driver is IMHO stupid. It drives linux fans away, to say nothing of the people we're trying to woo away from closed-source alternatives.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the attitude listed above as being that of team nouveau is one I've seen before in other F/OSS communities. "We either know it's broken already or you need to have latest and 'greatest' bleeding-edge experimental compiled-from-source everything before we'll help you troubleshoot it". This doesn't help matters, but then I also get where they're coming from -- when you're developing software, you can't be expected to know what "it's broken, please fix it" means when the end-user has any one of over a million possible combinations of hardware and software, plus versions of this or that.
But aside from this, I agree 100% with this post. Nouveau should *NOT* be the default driver. Optional, yes. Should proprietary be default? NO. What should be default? Something that works. Idunno, is VESA an option?
there should be an option in grub to just disable nouveau and use generic vesa. this is because it is out of the box BROKEN on many computers. windows would never ship a broken driver by default. I can't use linux on my mac because of this crap. If given the choice I would rather have my nipples blowtorched than buy an nvidia gpu, because intel has such great support.
ReplyDelete