Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Heads-up: KDEers: Particularly kde3-ers,

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Duncan<1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
<SNIP>
> Of course, I'd say another moral is to pick hardware that's FLOSS
> supported from the beginning, if at all possible.  Sometimes it may not
> be, and then one has to decide whether it's worth the negatives to go
> servantware or not.  It's a decision I'd make differently than many here,
> but it /is/ an individual decision.
>
<SNIP>

While I wholeheartedly agree - and whether or not someone takes action
on this agreement - the problem with Open Source is there is no real
commitment to support anything going forward, there is no commitment
to remove bugs if found, and there is no way to tell what the word
'supported' really means. It's up to the good graces and kindness of
those who write this stuff.

In the case of the Radeon 9100IGP chipset, it isn't that it's not
supported by the FLOSS driver - it was always supported, it's that a
certain FEATURE of the hardware wasn't supported. Now, if I had
purchased the machine specifically depending on this feature then
maybe I would have been more careful about understanding the level of
support, but the use of hardware changes over time. You buy a desktop
machine today and use it as a file server later. You buy a small
machine to use as a router and later decide to use it for MythTV.
Things change over time and we cannot always know how something will
be used, most especially I think with older hardware. We own it so we
try to use it. Better than scraping it and contributing to all the
trash problems we have on the planet.

Beyond all of that motherhood and apple pie stuff there's just the
problem of determining what the **REAL** quality and support is for
some piece of FLOSS. It's just nice people doing what they want to do.
It's great stuff, and amazing that we have what we have - operating
systems, desktops, applications - but it's not like we have real
quality control or a commitment to continuous improvement.

The current FLOSS radeon driver says there is support for TVOut on
this antiquated chipset.That is correct - it does work. However also
in truth, the picture on my TV is not pleasing and is so dark that in
many lighting conditions it is simply unusable. There are no xorg.conf
settings for changing brightness or contrast so I have no CPU level
control over it. Maybe it's an issue with this PC coupled with this
TV. Possibly it works better with other TVs. I don't know. The
developers do not seem inclined so far to help me out so I'm stuck for
now.

How do I address ALL of that prior to purchase? Look for someone using
the same hardware and driving the same TV? What's the chances? If I
cannot address ALL of it then it's still a shot in the dark.

Now, lest it sound like I'm complaining, I'm really not. I'm just
saying how I see the truth about this stuff. I prefer FLOSS when it
does what I need, but being FLOSS it may or may not be up to the
quality I can get from closed source support, especially in the area
of hardware support. If the closed source driver makes my wife happy
then who am I to tell her she cannot use it? Just because I'm
sys-admin for our midget little home network doesn't mean I want to
cook my own dinners or sleep on the back porch. We have wild animals
here. I'd like some guarantee of not being eaten at night! ;-)

Just my 2 cents,
Mark