Re: Dropping fallback mode in 3.8

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le mercredi 21 novembre 2012 à 20:53 +0100, Raphaël Jacquot a écrit :
> On 9 nov. 2012, at 16:56, Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > last weekend, the release team met and discussed (among other
> things)
> > the DropOrFixFallbackMode [1] feature. We've come to the conclusion
> > that we can't maintain fallback mode in reasonable quality, and are
> > better off dropping it. We're now working on organizing this so that
> > it does not create more unnecessary fallout.
> 
> I don't talk often on this list, for lack of available time, but have
> the following to say :
> 
> The decision is all nice and well. however this will force people that
> don't have the latest and greatest accelerated hardware to switch to
> something else.
> most PCs that are more that 2 years old are probably out of the game.
> 
> now the REAL question is :
> Is the Gnome community NO BETTER than Microsoft at forcing Hardware
> Upgrades ?
I really don't think this is a matter of recent hardware or not. I used
GNOME Shell for several years on a laptop that I bought in 2006. So
definitely not a recent machine.

But it had an Intel GPU with a good support. Today, the question is more
whether you have a good free driver for your card or not, which mostly
depends on the hardware vendor. (And guess what, the paradox is that
bleeding edge GPUs are often not supported as well as relatively older
ones.)

And of course, for people with poor driver support for they GPU,
llvmpipe should work with reasonably recent CPUs. This is not a very
strong requirement at all.


My two cents