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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: KDE4 graphics tweaks page
From:       "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo () kde ! org>
Date:       2008-07-14 21:40:20
Message-ID: 200807141540.20660.aseigo () kde ! org
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On Monday 14 July 2008, koos vriezen wrote:
> 2008/7/14 Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo@kde.org>:
> > On Monday 14 July 2008, koos vriezen wrote:
> > the obvious solution is "don't use those drivers". distros are really
> > responsible for providing a decent OOTB experience when it comes to such
> > system integration issues. in fact, that's one of their primary
> > contributions. that's not a job for kde.
>
> Isn't that an easy way out.

depends on how you define 'easy'. it's 'easy' in that i'm not taking on the job 
of other people (distros, GPU vendors, x.org developers, etc), but it's not 
easy in that it's a stand nobody else has been willing to take (which is why 
we are at this point, btw) and so it faces (well meaning) criticism from some 
of those observing. 

so work wise it's easy (though to fault us for not working hard would be silly 
;), but pressure wise it's quite hard.

> You self mentioned we're doing new stuff.
> Driver writers have to catch up on this.

we're using support for features that are literaly years old but which nobody 
has had the balls to use because (a) it's harder than just doing whate 
everyone's done before and (b) the dirty secret is that these features don't 
really work all that well in practice.

and that will never change until someone (e.g. plasma) forces the issue by 
*using* those features.

up until now driver writers have pointed fingers at x.org and x.org has pointed 
fingers at driver writers and it was a stale mate. now we have code that 
exercises these features and there's actual work going on instead of finger 
pointing.

i'd rather deal with an annoying year than never be able to stack up to what 
we can get on MacOS or Windows Vista in this regard.

> I agree that it's a distro
> thing, that's why such a black list should be in some desktop general
> config file (as regex, dunno).

i'm not in favour of this, but what would such a blacklist be compared 
against? and what would the patch look like to plasmaapp.cpp, since the 
detection needs to happen on QApplication creation but we'd have to read the 
config values out first?

> Btw. most distro already stip the nv driver by default.

hopefully they also ship reasonable tweaks to the config files then.

> Don't really know about other drivers. My 2.5 year old laptop has ATI
> express and just recenly gained DRM support. Will start compiling KDE4
> and see how it performs ..

let me know how it goes.

> >> The issue is known, why give them a bad feeling.
> >
> > i thought i just explained that, actually ;)
>
> Apparently I do care about the belly feeling of my fellow developers
> at nvidia. They were kind enough to acknownlege the problem and
> promise to fix it.
> Talking about bellies, I'm getting pretty sick of this nvidia bashing.
> If people don't like what the get for free

it isn't nvidia bashing; at least not from me. nvidia drivers have problems 
that affect our shared users (and therefore both us and nvidia). a solution for 
the userbase is to either use some other video card / driver combo, do the 
necessary tweaking or live with it. they can avoid the whole affair by using 
other vendor's products that do work if they are available in the form factor 
they are looking at (e.g. laptops; desktops can be trickier)

as for 'get for free', last i checked nvidia sold me the hardware which is no 
good without a driver and the driver they give me is also proprietary. so i 
paid money to get access to something that removes freedom from my computing 
experience. i understand all the reasons (and some of the excuses) behind this 
situation and am in no position to lecture nvidia about it, but let's not call 
"free" what was paid for in both money and freedom.

(actually, i didn't buy an nvidia card; it was donated to me by a company that 
did. i have a personal policy of only purchasing hardware i can get quality 
free software drivers for.)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech


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