LF Collab 2012: Killing Blobs, Wayland, DTrace, Etc

[XorEaxEax]

Give a Windows or Mac user anything else than Gnome or KDE and he's gonna laugh his ass off.

Based upon what? The 'compositing bling' ? Please explain which parts of these desktop environments make them the only thing Windows or Mac users may accept? I came from Windows to Linux myself.

Yeah, 3D sculpting with Blender. What a killer app for multimedia and desktop users. Way to go.

I brought it up as something performing very well using open souce nouveau despite being extremely dependant on 3d acceleration. Also, what multimedia/desktop killer app are you referring too which doesn't work under nouveau?

You raised the issue, why are you asking me?

No I didn't, I only responded.

[asdx]

I'm all for getting rid of binary blobs too (nvidia, fglrx, etc). They leave too much to be desired and they cause more issues than they solve. They're only good for 3D and that's it, everything else they implement it in a half-assed manner, not to mention they break all the time on each Xorg release, etc.

I hope that when Wayland comes out and KDE and Gnome adopts Wayland, they will break the NVIDIA drivers (and other blobs) beyond repair, I also hope that the Linux kernel will ban binary blobs support at some point.

We need to focus on improving the open source drivers and thinking about our independence. We need to stop thinking about blobs, otherwise we'll always be at the corporations mercy if they want to support our technology or not.

[asdx]

Based upon what? The 'compositing bling' ? Please explain which parts of these desktop environments make them the only thing Windows or Mac users may accept? I came from Windows to Linux myself.


I brought it up as something performing very well using open souce nouveau despite being extremely dependant on 3d acceleration. Also, what multimedia/desktop killer app are you referring too which doesn't work under nouveau?


No I didn't, I only responded.

Please stop feeding the troll.

[Nobu]

I have only this to say: I'm not spending $100+ on an OS (license) that I'll only use for browsing the web. Yes, you'll pay that much for Windows (or OS X before they became upgrades) if you aren't buying in bulk or OEM licenses. Of course, for the average consumer that cost is subsidised somewhere in the cost of their new computer, or they only need an upgrade which costs some fraction of a new license.

Operating systems with a Linux kernel provide a good alternative to Windows if all you do is browse the web. They may not be the best, but Linux provides a very good base with wide hardware support (including or excluding graphics drivers), and there are usable desktop environments that work ontop of it. Haiku, etc., are good (some would--I might even--say great) alternatives as long as your hardware is supported, but if it isn't then what do you fall back on? Either Linux, a BSD, OS X (almost, or really not an option for 3rd party hardware) or Windows.

[plonoma]

I just want Wayland to provide a good interface for doing many things.
Make sure it supports multiple output and input devices.
(If somebody has four screens three mouses and two keyboards connected to his/her computer it should also just work.)
Make sure things that can be modular are done so and don't make it difficult to make hardware acceleration for everything.


I'm hoping wayland and other new technologies would allow for relatively long period of stable api's.