Valve Pulls Its Unreleased Linux Client From Server

[Joe Sixpack]

Had you bothered to read my post completely before pressing the "Submit reply" button, you'd notice that I -am- doing something.
AMD/ATI lost more than 10,000$ of mine and my employer money due to their problematic upstream support. (Including a number of 470's that I'm currently in line for).

The main problem with your post is not that you dislike Fedora (Seems pointless to me, especially when you consider how many upstream development RedHat/Fedora is doing, but OK), the problem is that somehow ATI/AMD got the notion that if they support Ubuntu upstream, they can ignore X.org releases, and according to your post it seems that you're OK with it. (And far worse, it seems that Ubuntu management is OK with it).

Talk about being short-sighted.

- Gilboa

I have nothing against Fedora - it just isn't for me. If you are an AMD enthusiast then it probably isn't for you either - regardless if you realize it or not. AMD/ATI should definitely make it their business to support the most recent stable xorg release. The question is whether or not the version users are screaming for is stable yet. If it is, then they need to tighten up a whole lot. But if it isn't - that's a fail on the part of the distro shipping it. But regardless if it's stable or not, it's the distro's job to ship a cohesive set of packages. Don't ship me crappy KDE 4 when the KDE devs told you it wasn't stable and wasn't intended for mainstream use, and don't ship me xorg 7.x unless you know both Nvidia and ATI support it, or know for a fact they will support it soon.

The latter, of course, will never happen because Fedora's goal for about 2 years now is to provide nothing but completely free software. So why the hell you are trying to use proprietary drivers with a distro designed in opposition to proprietary software is beyond me.

So, without knowing anything about me, you:
A. Assume that I don't use RHEL and CentOS. (False assumption #1)
B. Assume that using Fedora in work environment is quote "idiotic". (False -and- arrogant assumption #2)

I agree with point A, but he's right about B. Fedora was introduced as a "testbed" for RHEL. That's why they always went bleeding edge over tried and tested. If the package is already known to be stable you won't find it in Fedora because they use the distro to test the unstable version. That's hardly a choice distro for a production environment.

Maybe this has changed in recently but that's the way it was for years so that's why a lot of people feel the way they do about Fedora. Personally, I'd much rather have stability over bleeding edge - which is why I switched from Fedora to Slackware years ago. I also got tired of their compiler chain, which has been broken since I tried Red Hat 7. That's the other part of what energyman was talking about when he said it's always broken.

[gilboa]

Joe,

How can you possibly assume that Fedora unsuitable as a workstation, without knowing what I do for a living? Have it occurred to you that maybe having the bleeding edge development tools and virtualization tools is -exactly- what we need?

Fedora doesn't fit -your- needs. It may, or may not be broken according to what -you- consider as broken. Get my point?

As for subject at hand, since Fedora 1, nVidia drivers have been rarely broken due to new Fedora features. (I personally only remember to major breakages: 4K_STACKS, and X.org bug in F12)

You choose the hardware according to the software, not the other way around. If nVidia starts breaking things (I doubt it), I'll consider switching hardware. (Hence my preference toward good OSS drivers)

- Gilboa

[V!NCENT]

How can you possibly assume that Fedora unsuitable as a workstation, without knowing what I do for a living? Have it occurred to you that maybe having the bleeding edge development tools and virtualization tools is -exactly- what we need?

Gilboa,

How can you possibly assume that everything that accounts for you, accounts for the rest of the world too? Then continue in speaking "us".

Fedora doesn't fit -your- needs. It may, or may not be broken according to what -you- consider as broken. Get my point?

Let me put it this way as I am actually using Fedora fulltime now that I have discovered that with KDE 4.4 Fedora is not as horribly broken as with Gnome (Oh, the irony!); the desktop freezes at random intervals of about 10 seconds. Totem is horribly broken (want to playback that rendered ray traced movie (remember: workstation!)? Aaaaaaahhw). And a lot more...

[gilboa]

Gilboa,

How can you possibly assume that everything that accounts for you, accounts for the rest of the world too? Then continue in speaking "us".

Seriously, are you for real?
"us" can be:
Me and my family.
Me and my friends.
My company.
My previous employer (past term).

Let me put it this way as I am actually using Fedora fulltime now that I have discovered that with KDE 4.4 Fedora is not as horribly broken as with Gnome (Oh, the irony!); the desktop freezes at random intervals of about 10 seconds. Totem is horribly broken (want to playback that rendered ray traced movie (remember: workstation!)? Aaaaaaahhw). And a lot more...

OK. Thanks for sharing. Not sure why it was relevant, hopefully you feel better now that you got if off you chest.

Back to the original (sub-)subject.
Again (slowly...), Fedora suite -me- and people -I- work with. ("US")
-I- buy nVidia hardware for my own use and for the people -I- work with ("US") because nVidia has better bleeding edge support which -we- need.
-I- find it inexcusable that ATI/AMD has yet to support a 7 month old X.org 7.4 release. (Let alone the newer X.org 7.5)
-I- prefer to use OSS drivers and willing to pay a hefty price for it (E.g. buy hardware twice as expensive for the same performance level), but for now, nVidia is the only viable option for -me- (or -us-).

How could I possibly make it easier to understand? Should I start using bold letters and small words?

- Gilboa

[mirv]

Just to point out - I'm using xorg-server 1.7 on Gentoo, with fglrx. AMD released a beta driver to support it - they keep track with what's available on supported distros (in this case, Ubuntu).
On a topic related note: if Valve ever release a Steam client, they might do something similar and only support specific distros. Of course, I'm sure Steam isn't as reliant upon a specific version of xorg as graphics drivers are.

[V!NCENT]

Seriously, are you for real?
"us" can be:
Me and my family.
Me and my friends.
My company.
My previous employer (past term).

Your ego just scored +10 kudo's for being such an overly bombastic intelletctual. Congrats! You win the big price!

OK. Thanks for sharing. Not sure why it was relevant

Yes, it shows... But I'll forgive you for mistakingly confusing the term workstation with production system. So now I'll enlighten thou soul:
Fedora, not being suitable for anything workstation (given the current lacking state of FLOSS drivers), doesn't realy work that well for at least me and someone else. It periodically freezes at random time intervals where speed can be graphed out to system performance and responsiveness by inputdevices (although the 64x64 pixel cursor sprite blitting will statistically still work during that freeze).

That said it fails as a workstation. Just becouse -you- are able to use it, it may not work for all of -us- Phoronix users.

Crap! that lost you 20 kudo's for completely missing the point.

You are now at -10 kudo's in total (given that I am the first one to use such a social phenomenon as kudo's here on the Phoronix forums - and for the first time ever).

[gilboa]

Seriously, are you for real?

Yep, sadly enough, you are for real.

[V!NCENT]

Yep, sadly enough, you are for real.

Making it work out as a workstation for yourself still isn't making it qualify as a workstation for everyone...

But you lost your bombastic intellect Seriously, yo! It almost impressed me... Work on it

[smitty3268]

gilboa, the fact that you said your employer lost $10,000 seems to make a strong argument that perhaps Fedora isn't great for a production workstation. Just sayin... You shouldn't blame ATI for that, since they explicitly don't support Fedora. The fault lies with either: a. the person who chose to use Fedora on that hardware, or b. the person who chose to buy that hardware for a Fedora system.

[V!NCENT]

@smitty: nice ^^,