Ghworg (part of Planet #lugradio) recently posted about his efforts to stop lockups with nvidia drivers and AGP.
Kudos to Ghworg both for solving his problem and blogging it so others can learn from it (I’ve done similar things myself). However, seeing stuff like this just makes me shudder. Sure it’s one of the greatest strengths of Linux, but to me it’s also one its greatest weaknesses. It’s great that you can fix stuff like this (if you know what you’re doing), but how is a normal user going to figure out something like this? Google is not a sufficient answer as knowledge does not imply ability.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating using another OS over Linux – after all, you wouldn’t even be able to fix a problem like this – but I believe that things like this will prevent Linux from becoming the mainstream desktop OS so many people would like it to be.
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tried breezy yet?
Actually I have. I briefly tried colony 3, made the switch from Hoary at colony 4, and tracked it up until about a week before release. Then a hardware problem meant I had to switch machines and I’ve only just gotten back to Breezy now.
It *is* very good, and it *does* mask a large part of what my post is concerned with (which is what I assume you meant by your question), but the problem is still there.
However I can’t honestly class myself as being truly objective – a little knowledge is a dangerous thing you know – so, soon I am going to be inflicting Breezy on various friends and relatives (in the form of "Edubuntu":http://www.edubuntu.org/ for the kids) to see how they fair.
You could quite easily put the blame for my problem on the non-opensource nature of the nvidia drivers themselves rather than linux. Although I agree that there are still too many showstoppers like this in the OS.
It is steadily improving though, you can see a huge difference in the ease of setting up a system compared to only a year ago.