Re: gnome 3

[Dodji Seketeli <dodji seketeli org>]

Jan de Groot <jan jgc homeip net> a écrit:

> On Sun, 2011-04-17 at 08:45 +0530, Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
>> This is why I think GNOME should start a marketing campaign of
>> "Awesome Hardware" which is known to work flawlessly, and "Sadface
>> Hardware" which is known to work, but with glitches. This can help
>> users make informed choices while buying machines (or building them),
>> and would help us improve hardware support for Linux as well. In most
>> cases, it's just the last 1% that's left. 
>
> With linux it's impossible to support such a list. Things that work
> perfect on the kernel you test with will be broken two versions after
> that. The issue is not just limited to kernels, but also to manufacturer
> BIOS versions, xorg-server, the video driver and mesa. If you add binary
> drivers like nvidia or fglrx to that list, things become even more
> complicated.

If some people are willing to maintain such a list, I believe they
should not be discouraged, to say the least.  There are similar pages
somewhere on the interweb targeted at laptops and they did help me quite
a bit in my buying choices.  Having your hardware not well supported
just because of a bug in a certain version of the kernel is not the same
thing as having it not supported because the manufacturer doesn't
provide Free Software drivers.  In the former case you can get away with
e.g, selecting a given version of the kernel and in the latter case you
are just asking for troubles if you buy such a hardware.

I understand the complexity of adding non-free divers to the testing
matrix, but is that really a problem?  Why not just considering Free
Software drivers?  Would that be _that_ surprising, coming from us?

-- 
		Dodji