ATI video comes out of the closet

[Les Mikesell]

Sam Varshavchik wrote:

>>> Everything comes from Apple or is blessed by Apple.
>>
>> And how does that differ conceptually from buying a system integrated 
>> by Dell, HP, etc. and pre-loaded with an OS?
> 
> Dell didn't write the OS they're bundling.

With Linux, they can.  Do you expect that to make it better?  I don't.

>>> Both Linux and Windows work on platforms that have, literally,
>>> thousands of vendors manufacturing a tremendous range of equipment,
>>> most of which has to have a properly working device driver.
>>
>> Yes, and my experience over the last 5 years has been that the Windows 
>> versions are more dependable than the fedora versions.  I'm sure there 
>> are individual exceptions to that, but I just don't see fedora as a 
>> bastion of stability here - or in a position to claim that they have 
>> the only approach to drivers that can work.
> 
> Perhaps true, but this is not going to change until more hardware 
> manufacturers support free software.

I realize it isn't going to change, but as the binary drivers that are 
just fine under windows prove, it isn't the hardware manufacturers' fault.

 > For hardware manufacturers that
> support free software, their hardware has always been rock solid. Case 
> in point: I've used various Adaptec SCSI HBAs for more than a decade. 
> Never had a problem, except for one stretch, which has mostly due to me 
> using a bleeding edge (at that time) 64bit Opteron.

You were lucky.  There was another time in the RH9/FC1 era where they 
didn't work with the updated controllers, but Windows was in the same 
shape until they did a respin of their install CD, probably around 
win2ksp2.  And the windows installer was too dumb to load the driver 
from anything but a stock floppy so this was really painful on servers 
that did not have floppy drives.  At least fedora could get it from a CD 
or USB floppy.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com