First: To state the obvious, I'm not the same guy as the guy with this upgrading troubles. Second: You still sound like a zealot if you talk in absolutes and k

First: To state the obvious, I'm not the same guy as the guy with this upgrading troubles. Second: You still sound like a zealot if you talk in absolutes and keep your condescending tone. So I should buy a console and a big TV (I have neither)? And that idea (buying a completely closed platform like a PS3/XBox 360) doesn't violate your grand plan of bringing freedom and open specifications to everyone? You silently ignored my 'what about existing machines?' point. It seems those are out of luck as well, so we're finally arriving in a world where you suggest to buy specific hardware for running Linux. Like we had to do, 10 years ago. How can you write arguments like 'the manufacturer doesn't care about you' and continue with 'the distribution maintainers probably didn't like to include the proprietary driver' and 'tough luck if your machine won't work now' (paraphrased)? If the end user is my aunt, where's the end-user visible difference between 'Nvidia doesn't care about her' or 'Ubuntu doesn't care about her, because that off-the-shelf machine has a graphic card from one of the two big manufactures on the market'? I stick to my point here: What the original author experienced was a regression in the distribution. The reasons for bad (open, free/libre) hardware support, while correct and sad at the same time, don't matter here. You saw 'had to blacklist nuveau' and jumped on it. It worked first, it broke after an update -> Ubuntu fail. NVidia hate might be a pet peeve of yours, but is only tangentially related to the experience described above. (Disclaimer: I don't have a graphic card from NVidia, nor do I run Ubuntu on any machine of mine. I've got no options of NVidia nor do I want to diminish the work of the Ubuntu maintainers, although I have to admit that I stopped being a member of the 'free or not all all' crowd quite some time ago)