It's about making things as stable as possible by using sensible defaults. An experimental driver which knows nothing about the hardware it drives should be made optional with a big disclaimer attached.

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If nVidia gave half a damn about open source, we would have a proper open source drivers with some nVidia support. I dont even count the old .nv driver are 'proper' open source as it was always obfuscated. Since .nv is dead and gone, nVidia suggests using VESA untill you can get the closed source drivers installed.

VESA 'knows' even less about the hardware than nouveau.

I'd hardly call nouveau 'experimental'.

Nouveau is a pain in @ss and it's definitely the only driver in my Linux experience that I have to deal with that causes instability on any of my hardware. Slackware uses a non graphical installer precisely for the reason of allowing to get a working system up and running as trouble free as possible (or at least that's my best guess as to why). To then turn around and have a flaky driver that probably a minimum of 50% of affected users have to then turn around and blacklist seems odd.

Not sure where you got that information. Anyhow nouveau works well here.

"Probably" was meant to imply I don't have numbers, just my general take from reading posts and threads. It would be an interesting poll though.

Are you running new hardware (particularly GT/GTS/GTX 4XX or newer), or at least hardware that is newer than the nouveau version?

I run two GT220 's and was using on old 6200. The 6200 failed to work properly and I didn't want the proprietary driver on that machine so it was faster to just pull the card and go with onboard graphics and intel drivers. It's headless these days anyway, so the graphics are only over XDMCP. This was around July on a fresh install of current, it had been working fine with the blob running 13.37. I much preferred the old default of blacklisting Nouveau and then either unblacklisting it or installing the blob.

Odd, I would have thought that 13.37 would have had a version of nouveau that works fine with GT220s. Unless it was 2 x GT220s in a single machine, I have no idea why it was so buggy for you...

No, I use nouveau on the 220's (two different machines) long enough to download the blob. I enjoy testing Slackware current, but I was done with testing nouveau a few months after it was released except when I do a new clean install I might play with it for a day or so, or until it acts goofy. Spending extra money for a video card (even $100) and then using limited drivers doesn't make sense to me.

Current (as of about July) would not work with nouveau and a 6200 card which is what I found odd, it's an old model even though I bought it just 3 years ago. 13.37 and the blob worked fine. I don't really see the point of spending money for a graphics card then using a limited driver, but on that machine a stock (eg. no additional steps when following current) installation was important. Since it was to be headless, nouveau seemed like a safe choice, but there were issues that I resolved just by using onboard intel graphics after a few hours fighting nouveau.

No idea why you had issues then, sorry.

IMO $100 is getting well into 'spent a fair bit of cash for faster graphics for gaming' area. A $30 or less G210 will run a desktop just fine.

6200s are awful cards. I've heard of some major issues with them with windows and had some minor problems myself (windows, not linux, never used a 6200 with linux)

I do my best to avoid any cards that use 'turbocache', in particular the low-end 6XXX and 7XXX cards.

I know, older post, but I was just wondering if you have used ATI/AMD radeon cards with the free or closed drivers?

They don't. That's the reality, let's face it.

VESA is an official supported interface. It calls the VESA BIOS for modesetting and framebuffer access. The VESA BIOS on nVidia hardware is code from nVidia itself, so it knows how to drive the hardware correctly.

But it is. nVidia is constantly releasing new hardware, which nouveau doesn't support correctly, but tries to and crashes. This is not called stable but experimental (say alpha stage).

This posting is not about removing the choice to use this driver, its about making it the default for said hardware, which is a bad decision IMHO.

@jtsn: If I understand well, you suggest to make VESA the default for nVidia GPUs. Regardless whether this would be preferable or not, how would you do that?

In other words, how could one tell the X server to use vesa, but only for nVidia GPUs?

Like it was done before on Slackware: By blacklisting nouveau and leave it up to the user to enable it.

Just try an older Slackware release on nVidia hardware and see how it works.

There could also be an option in liloconfig, which asks about KMS in general.

As already stated, blackisting nouveau won't prevent X to load it when started and use the nouveau X module.

About liloconfig, not all users run it. furthermore if they run it in expert mode they can disable KMS, but that wouldn't make it the default.

That's a harsh statement. True, they don't go the full mile. But they *DO* give us a driver that works almost perfectly and with the performance of the other OS, thus making Linux fully competetive on the desktop. I'd call that "giving half a damn" - at least. And they support 15 year old hardware. Try any of that with ATI.