[Desktop 12.10 Topic] The future of third-party driver installation

[Bryce Harrington]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 01:56:53AM +0200, Jo-Erlend Schinstad wrote:
> If this was going to be redesigned, I would rather see it as a "Hardware
> manager". Ubuntu is currently promoting drivers as an optional extra.
> But that's not true; drivers are always necessary for all hardware. One
> problem with doing that, is that when you're missing an important driver
> and it's not available in Jockey, then you get the impression that
> Ubuntu has no drivers for your system. Reality is that Ubuntu has nearly
> all of your drivers, but missing one. Users should see that. Otherwise,
> we're always reinforcing the negative without showing anything positive.

It's a good point.  And in fact you're right, updates for various
non-proprietary drivers are available to users.  A good case in point
being the x-updates ppa which provides updated X video drivers.  And
you're right that this is less visible than the fglrx/nvidia updates
that come through jockey.  Now, drivers provided via a ppa is not the
same thing, but from a user's perspective I don't think they really draw
a distinction.  Newer == better.

I kind of worry that partly because we don't have a "rolling update",
users end up seeking out updates from highly unofficial
channels... xorg-edgers, kernel mainline ppas, even installing drivers
from third party sites like amd.com and nvidia.com.  Half the fglrx and
nvidia bug reports we see are a result of some sort of mix-and-match
cobbled together system that inevitably breaks in some oddball way.
Anything we can do to guide such users towards more sane update
solutions would be a positive in my book, so long as doing so doesn't
incur additional support workloads.

> If changes are to be made, I would propose that it displayed all your
> hardware, what drivers it is currently using and then make it easy to
> install other drivers. From this application, you should be able to
> export your hardware info so that you can easily provide this to
> support. (System Info > Hardware Manager > Send To: pastebin | email |
> IM | etc).

This is a very interesting idea.  Already we have tools scripts and apps
scattered hither and yon that gathers this info.  Would be nice to have
it in a simple, parseable form (maybe a text file somewhere in /var?)
might help in a lot of areas.

> That is to say, even if your computer doesn't require any proprietary
> drivers, the application should still be useful. It would then display
> the drivers, the developer being listed as Linux. If there are
> alternatives, or third-party drivers are required, then you should be
> able to easily install them. As a service to the user, this application
> should also provide links to the manufacturers website for further
> support. This would both be helpful to the user, and show who's
> responsible. In other words; "We have installed all your drivers for you
> automatically, except that one."

Yes, it would be important in a tool like this to make sure it guides
people *away* from unsupportable configurations, and makes it clear if
they insist on doing it anyway, that it taints their system and may
incur other bugs that we can't really fix.  In fact, if this tool could
communicate the level of taintedness of the system, that might be usable
in the apport bug hooks to prevent bugs from being filed to us on such
systems.

At the same time, for users who aren't as worried about this or who have
hardware that simply wasn't properly supported at the time of the
release, it'd give them an extra avenue for testing out alternative
versions to work around problems or improve their hardware performance,
while giving them a measurable way for what'd need done to restore the
system to stock.

> Perhaps this application could also be used to try and find out which
> computer model you have, and provide some kind of forum where you can
> connect to other users with the same hardware? That way, people can
> share their experiences, and support would be able to help a large
> number of people at the same time, instead of each user having to begin
> with a Google search and go from there. That would enable automatic
> detection of some troublesome hardware as well, because it would
> automatically get many posts.

Interesting idea.  This could possibly be handy as an os maintainer
too.  Receive a new computer and pull up a listing of all bugs specific
to that system's particular combination of hardware and drivers.

Bryce