I upgraded my Dapper and imagine my surprise...

[Lee Revell]

On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 10:07 -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Lee Revell wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 2006-02-11 at 17:21 +0000, paul cooke wrote:
> >> >
> >> > There are many, many people who bought their PCs for doing real work
> >> and
> >> > don't care about the lack of hardware accelerated 3D - they would
> >> rather
> >> > run a truly free software OS than install proprietary drivers.
> >> 
> >> troll alert...
> > 
> > Come on dude, I'm not trolling, I'm just saying if you don't play games
> > then it's better to not install the proprietary nvidia driver, and have
> > a 100% free software OS.  Only an Nvidia fanboy would cinsider that a
> > troll.
> 
> Sure you are.  Just because we hang out on a Linux mailing list is no reason
> to expect that we all share your religious view of Linux/Ubuntu.  I fully
> agree with you that large numbers of Linux users don't care about hardware
> accelerated 3D, but I'd also bet that any survey of the Ubuntu base would
> show that less than a majority care about "Free as in Speech" and are only
> concerned about "Free as in Beer".  Since the _vast_ majority of Ubuntu
> users (and other Debian derived distros) only ever install binary packages,
> anyway, most of them would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between
> the nv and nvidia drivers except by performance.
> 
> Personally, I use Free software when possible, but I'll buy commercial
> software and even run it on Windows if that's what it takes to get the job
> done.

Dude, it's not a religious argument, it's a technical one.  Sure, most
users won't notice the difference, until they encounter a bug in the
kernel and are told it can't be debugged with a proprietary driver
loaded.  Then they're back in Windows land, at the mercy of Microsoft
(or Nvidia) to someday fix their problem.

Lee