[Wylug-discuss] Laptops again

[John Hodrien]

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011, Paul Brook wrote:

> That hasn't been my personal experience at all.  Out of three machines (over a
> couple of hardware generations) with a nVidia card only one was ever stable
> under the proprietary drivers.  The other two required unplanned rebots at
> least once a week.

We've had several hundred linux machines with nVidia graphics since TNT2 and
original GeForce 128 (?) days.  nVidia hasn't been the cause of stability
issues, unless you count locking X up solid with dodgy CUDA.

> Updates for new kernels/Xorg only arrive after upstream has made releases.  If
> you're running Ubuntu or Fedora (or I guess CentOS which has very slow update
> cycles) you might be lucky and not hit this.  If you're running anything else
> there's a good chance your distro will push out an upgrade before nVidia does.

I've only got experience with Fedora and RHEL/CentOS.  nVidia have treated
linux pretty well in my experience, releasing drivers give or take at the same
time on Linux and Windows, and coming up with patches through nvnews.net in
response to problems on Linux like pretty much no other hardware manufacturer
I've dealt with.  So my experience on CentOS is you install one package when
you first install CentOS, and you might not need to update it again for the
life of the distro if you don't want to.

> IIRC they still don't support xrandr, so you have to use the shonky nvidia app
> rather than the standard display controls.

This isn't true, RandR support has been in there for a good old while.  It's
not the latest version of RandR but it does rotate and resize just fine.
You'll get better RandR support with Intel (is it version 1.2?) that does
thinks like dynamic display detection.

> On top of all this, support for older hardware is somewhat sketchy.  There are
> "Legacy" drivers, but they're subject to ever less maintanance than the
> regular ones.

This is entirely true, but it's probably true with most drivers, as the focus
tends to shift to the most used chipsets.  That doesn't mean that it doesn't
work.

> Given this is a request explicitly asking about good linux support it seems
> reasonable to recommend vendors that support their open source drivers (Intel,
> ATI) over a company that actively avoids them (nVidia).

And this is where I disagree.  The open source-ness shouldn't matter unless
you've got political reasons.  Problems with old hardware or slow releases of
drivers is *entirely* valid.

> While I can't claim to be unbiased on this subject (IMO binary kernel modules
> are just plain wrong), I think it's faily clear that open source drivers are
> always going to provide better out the box workingness and generally less
> hassle to keep alive medium/long term than proprietary ones.
>
> I'll admit that the nVidia proprietary drivers seem to be the best of a bad
> bunch, but that's not saying a lot.

The problem over the years has been the quality of the OpenGL implementation.
nVidia have just been top of the heap.  ATI's fglrx driver is significantly
worse, and Intel's chipset's have never really cut it on the performance side.
On laptops I concede that's less important, but I work in virtual reality and
visualization, where active stereo, large window support (nVidia supports
8192x8192 pixel OpenGL contexts), and high performance is rather critical.
nVidia have been the only ones to convincingly offer that.

ATI are late to the open source party, as they used to have pretty much an
identical model to nVidia apart from for their old chipsets which they pretty
much abandoned to the open source community.

I'm *not* against Intel HD graphics in a laptop.

jh