Monday, October 08, 2007

Nouveau drivers

I keep hearing that once Nouveau drivers (open source drivers for NVIDIA cards) reach maturity we will finally have video drivers problem "solved". It is funny how even intelligent people fail to see the reality of their (well, our) beloved Linux OS. Nouveau project will never reach maturity. Look at the pace at which NVIDIA and ATI are releasing new products. We will never catch up!

And lets not forget that the situation with ATI open source drivers is even worse. The only video card for which there are decent open source drivers is Intel and this situation is not going to change any time soon. Never, actually.

People may get fooled by the fact that the situation with Linux video drivers improved dramatically over the past 10 years, but this is only because there much less video card companies than it used to be.

However, I'd argue that, in spite of all the above, the situation with Linux video drivers is OK. Desktop Linux is a niche OS and will remain such until something dramatic happens. And for a niche OS it is perfectly acceptable to support only very specific hardware, i.e. Intel.

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