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Exactly. A non negligible part of his rant was about proprietary graphic drivers. Free software developers can't do anything about that, and anyway what is the

Exactly. A non negligible part of his rant was about proprietary graphic drivers. Free software developers can't do anything about that, and anyway what is the point? Today, if you want to game just use Windows, if you want a fine Linux laptop get one with something like an Haswell with integrated graphics (or maybe Broadwell, still wait a little for Skylakes) And anyway if you look at what the "competition" sells while being this much critical, you can probably write something at least as long. Even last MS flagship devices running last Windows 10 versions are full of bugs now -- and likewise for major PC vendors like Dell -- so GNU/Linux distributions might as well become attractive just because Windows devices are of terrible quality today :p

vacri 11y ago
I thought a similar thing when I was reading it, but regardless of who is responsible for a problem, it's still a problem that should be acknowledged in such a list. Graphics on linux is a hard problem to solve cleanly. It's not anyone in particular's fault, and it's entirely reasonable when you understand the context, but it's still a problem. In context, linux does very well given the restrictions, but it's still not as buttery as the proprietary offerings.
- davidw 11y ago
  > It's not anyone in particular's fault If the company producing and selling the hardware is not giving the specs to their users, then it's their fault. Perhaps that's a bit too RMS for some people, but in this case I basically agree with him. It's mine, I bought it, I want to run whatever I want to on it.
  - jsheard 11y ago
    > If the company producing and selling the hardware is not giving the specs to their users, then it's their fault. AMD started releasing the low-level documentation for their GPUs in 2008, and although the FOSS drivers have benefitted stability-wise they're still lagging in API features and often offer less than half the performance of the proprietary counterparts. As far as I know we don't have a complete FOSS OpenCL 1.0 (ca. 2009) implementation for any ISA, nevermind newer versions or competitive performance. Unfortunately GPUs are so complex that specs alone don't guarantee good drivers.
agumonkey 11y ago
I'm really waiting for the day an open source gpu with decent capabilities and clean design for simple drivers hit the market. The reverse engineering headaches are getting absurd these days.
aidenn0 11y ago
> A non negligible part of his rant was about proprietary graphic drivers. Free software developers can't do anything about that, and anyway what is the point? Whether or not it is fixable by the community is unimportant to an end-user that just wants something that works.

vacri 11y ago

I thought a similar thing when I was reading it, but regardless of who is responsible for a problem, it's still a problem that should be acknowledged in such a list. Graphics on linux is a hard problem to solve cleanly. It's not anyone in particular's fault, and it's entirely reasonable when you understand the context, but it's still a problem. In context, linux does very well given the restrictions, but it's still not as buttery as the proprietary offerings.

davidw 11y ago
> It's not anyone in particular's fault If the company producing and selling the hardware is not giving the specs to their users, then it's their fault. Perhaps that's a bit too RMS for some people, but in this case I basically agree with him. It's mine, I bought it, I want to run whatever I want to on it.
- jsheard 11y ago
  > If the company producing and selling the hardware is not giving the specs to their users, then it's their fault. AMD started releasing the low-level documentation for their GPUs in 2008, and although the FOSS drivers have benefitted stability-wise they're still lagging in API features and often offer less than half the performance of the proprietary counterparts. As far as I know we don't have a complete FOSS OpenCL 1.0 (ca. 2009) implementation for any ISA, nevermind newer versions or competitive performance. Unfortunately GPUs are so complex that specs alone don't guarantee good drivers.

agumonkey 11y ago

I'm really waiting for the day an open source gpu with decent capabilities and clean design for simple drivers hit the market. The reverse engineering headaches are getting absurd these days.

aidenn0 11y ago

> A non negligible part of his rant was about proprietary graphic drivers. Free software developers can't do anything about that, and anyway what is the point? Whether or not it is fixable by the community is unimportant to an end-user that just wants something that works.