gxsaurav

mehul

bundling propriety drivers & configuring them are 2 different things

right now, quite frankly, we don't have good out of the box drivers in both windows & Linux, so what do we do, we go to the hardware manufacturer site, & download them for free. No one is saying to bundle it anyway, just bundle basic drivers with the OS, so that it at least works, even the default drivers in paid Windows OS are no good, we download new anyway

what Linux lacks, is configurability. What the point of editing xconfig file manually using some text editor, can't they make it like some menu or something, when I used ubuntu live, I saw this option that I could chose my graphics driver from a drop down list (some where in the control panel) there were names like nv, ati, Intel etc, this is what I m saying to make better.

Even if Linux doesn't bundle prosperity drivers, this is not a point to say that hardware manufacturers should open source their drivers, cos even with closed source, like we have right now, works fine. linux can excel even with closed source drivers, & going open source decreases the development cost this is the only reason I fine valid from a business point of view, because of which companies are going Open source

In this regard I like gentoo, just give the source code as some .zip file or something else like that, & double click on it, to start the driver building for your computer, but in an easy way, not in that dos screen way, which I saw long ago in mandrake 10 while installing NVIDIA drivers

or better yet, make a standard, that each Linux distro must support 90% of the graphical features of the kernel out of the box, so that one driver fits these 90% with all the distros & even with modified kernal, atleast this 90% stays same, & after that u can simply install addins in it, to further enhance for your particular distro (like if u have a good gfx card, u can install the module for XGL, or if not stay with that 90% & 2D UI)

It's not that I hate linux, it's just i hate it's usability in it's current form, just make it user friendly, increse the developement rate (remember GAIM still has no support for webcam) etc, & it can easily be widely adopted. I mean, for a user point of view, who can hate free stuff anyway

now if they only bundle free bear with it