Looking for the right forum to post this OpEd, not a “Help” post, I think this is the best place…
Skimming the latest posts to the Install Technical Help Forum, guessing that a substantial number of problems posted by those who don’t know enough to post their video hardware when complaining about video problems (indicating they’re likely less experienced), it’s likely that most of those posts are related to the ongoing Nouveau (nVidia) driver problem.
According to the openSUSE 12.2 Release Notes, it even seems that the problem is understood. So, the big question then is WHY? Why hasn’t someone actually written the code to fix the problem, even if it’s to implement the suggested workaround (NOMODESET) when the situation is detected. Heck. it seems that initially when the install has completed, the display driver is even working…
So, why does the driver fail with first system reboot?
And, I repeat… Why is there no code that detects the error and fixes the problem?
This is a real reputation killer that I’m sure is a deal breaker for anyone who hasn’t the technical skill or patience to get the system working.
According to my recollection, I believe this problem has been happening all the way since v11.3. Surely 6 years or so is long enough for someone to have fixed this issue.
On 2012-09-23 11:16, creatura85 wrote:
>
> No, there is no need to kick Nouveau in the pants as you said, nouveau
> is a good driver for users that have really old nvidia cards.
I don’t think my card is “really old”.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Absolutely no reason to kick Nouveau in the pants. I’d rather see them go on until we can kick NVIDIA (not in the pants, just kick) 's driver, because we have something better and open source.
On 2012-09-23 15:56, Knurpht wrote:
>
> Absolutely no reason to kick Nouveau in the pants. I’d rather see them
> go on until we can kick NVIDIA (not in the pants, just kick) 's driver,
> because we have something better and open source.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen, either: there will always be a delay since
nvidia releases a card and nouveau catches up with it. They have to reverse engineer it, after all.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
I would like to see Nouveau die. It is not the developers fault it is pretty much worthless, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is.
For anything remotely 3D Nouveau fall on its face.
With my GTX 550Ti card, my system is unusable until I install the real drivers. The mouse stutters across the screen with Nouveau.
Now that Nvidia has finally joined the Linux foundation hopefully Nvidia will either opens source its drivers, killing Nouveau or helps the Nouveau team fix its broken driver.
> I would like to see Nouveau die. It is not the developers fault it is
> pretty much worthless, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is.
If Nouveau is pretty much worthless, what does that make nVidia? Worse
than worthless? On this machine, I have the odd problem with Nouveau but
the nVidia driver appears to turn Xorg into a CPU hog.
In the past few years, I’ve used either driver, depending on which had
the faults I could most easily live with. Sometimes Nouveau would be
unusable and sometimes it would be nVidia. Killing Nouveau would be
a disastrous move.
–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 12.2 (64-bit); KDE 4.9.2; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA); Wireless: BCM4306
Agreed.
I like using Nouveau because i support freedom. admittedly, i do not use it on the one laptop with a Nvidia card, but that’s only because i seem to get better battery life with the proprietary driver, and i require long battery life where i live.
On my desktop i run Nouveau. Opensuse actually boots up all glitchy unless i press escape while booting, but i’m sure this could be fixed easily; other than that, i have no problems with it, and am glad Nouveau exist.
I think it’s terrible that there’s such strong hate coming from people here.
You have to understand though that not everyone is using the newest Nvidia cards. I’m still using an 8400 GS for example (and that’s a PCI card. This is the best card I can use on my older P4 AGP/PCI system to my knowledge). Also sometimes the proprietary developers do not want to support older hardware for as long as some users desire to keep using it. This means open source projects like Nouveau could become vital for these users. It might be tempting to tell people that they can’t use hardware over 5-7 years old but that’s not what Linux is all about. Some people have philosphical reasons for avoiding the proprietary drivers. That should be respected.
Nouveau has been making some slow progress in 3D as well for some models. No it isn’t on par with the proprietary driver for most hardware but it’s getting there. Especially for the older stuff.
