I upgraded my Dapper and imagine my surprise...

[Derek Broughton]

Lee Revell wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 17:00 -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> Lee Revell wrote:
>> 
>> > 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
>> 
>> They're almost _never_ going to find such a thing.  I've been using Linux
>> for 7 or 8 years now, and have never once encountered a bug in the kernel
>> that I worried about.
> 
> Either you are very lucky, or choose your hardware very carefully.

_This_ time I chose my hardware carefully.  

> There's lots of hardware out there that isn't so well supported.
> Hardware changes faster all the time so it's increasingly important to
> be able to debug these problems.

How much does it matter?  Most people don't _add_ much hardware to a
computer once they've bought it.  If they get their system working with
Ubuntu initially, they're highly unlikely to have a problem in future.  If
they do, they go back to their previous working kernel (which is why I said
I've never encountered a bug I worried about).  I point out that _this_
time I chose carefully, because with my first Linux system I tried and
discarded probably half-a-dozen distros before I got one that would install
and boot with the hardware I had.  Since then, I've always checked for
success stories online about any system I was looking at.

> You're right, for now it's not too bad because most people only run one
> proprietary driver (nvidia).  But if vendors start to get the idea that
> people are OK with proprietary drivers, next year you'll need one for
> your soundcard AND network adapter and wireless and everything else.

You already do.  I think you'll find very nearly as many people running
binary wireless drivers through ndiswrapper as running native drivers.

> Sorry if I come across as preachy, it's just important for users to
> understand that if they want to be able to continue to run Linux in the
> future, it's important to buy hardware that does not require a binary
> driver (if they have a choice of course).

I _do_ agree.  I'd rather not fault people for the bad choices they've
already made, though.  Remember, they're already feeling bad enough :-)
-- 
derek