Two rather negative articles about Ubuntu

[Tristan Wibberley]

Lee Revell wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 23:20 +0100, Tristan Wibberley wrote:
>> When I think of user-friendly X-config tool, I imagine something that 
>> runs at install time and configures it, and doesn't even say anything 
>> unless something goes wrong. Maybe followed by a bubble notification 
>> when you log in saying that you are running with incomplete drivers
>> and offering to install the restricted drivers.
>>
> 
> I think that's a bad idea.  If the system works fine with the open
> source drivers, why should we advise the user to install the proprietary
> ones?

If the system works fine with the open source drivers, we *shouldn't* 
advise the user to install the proprietary ones, but it *doesn't* work 
fine with the open source nvidia drivers. DVD playback uses about 60% 
CPU on a AMD64 1.8GHz CPU with mplayer. With the tdfx driver (and a 
voodoo 3 3000 - I think it was) a 400MHz PII could play DVDs fine with 
mplayer, so the 1.8GHz CPU should be requiring less than 20% (due to 
computations per clock improvements).

The closed source nvidia driver requires about 13% CPU with totem, or 
about 8% with mplayer - which indicates a problem with the open source 
drivers.

CPU usage figures were the last time I checked (a couple of months ago) 
and as my memory serves. Perhaps things have improved recently.

-- 
Tristan Wibberley

These opinions are my own.