Nv(4) did drive the 2D units of older nVidia GPUs made for 2D GDI acceleration. Post-2007-GPUs don't have these units, because no modern desktop OS uses them anymore. So nv(4) lost its purpose.

But Nouveau might still try to drive such a card- and fail. There is not much choice anymore, because with udev now everything is plug & pray.
$1000+ cards are used on Unix/Linux primarily and the nVidia Linux driver development was mainly focused on these cards. Only recently some consumer features like "application profiles" got added due to Valve's move. 3D Vision and other stuff like that is still missing.

It was a 2D-only and had the same purpose as the VESA/EFI framebuffer.

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Plus really if you look at it, nouveau will only "get it working" as well. Yes, you should actually install the Nvidia driver if you want complete support however. Relying on nouveau is not very recommended. It works, but remember well that most of this work comes through reverse engineering efforts and only some minimal contributions. It's nice and works but it does have its shortfalls here and there.

And yes, if you have a Quadro card, the Nvidia driver is what you should be using.

Annnnnd: back to the discussion; after all the nVidia-bashing ...
I think Wayland has a good idea; which will really help Linux on the desktop. I think the community as a whole can really benefit from it.
However, there should (still) be the choice: X or Wayland (or Mir); because there are places where X will be preferred and others where Wayland-likes ought to be the primary choice.

OK, that's only a proof of concept at the moment, but it's amazing!

Chen, Ping-Hsun aka penk has cooked an ISO image that is a small and live Linux distribution including a graphical browser that rely only on a framebuffer.

I've tried it on an USB stick and it works.

Just follow instructions and be aware that after having launched oxide, you'll have to use the mouse to move the cursor to input fields or hyperlinks as else the keyboard is attached to the console.

Granted, the browser doesn't include a menu, so to change websites or pages you'll have to click on hyperlinks or restart oxide, but this put aside everything works as expected (by me, at least :-), including scrolling with the wheel of the mouse.

To give it a go, just visit this page.

Caveat: you can try it in VirtualBox. In a real machine, you'll need an Intel, nVidia or AMD/ATi device with KMS support. But I think that most machines fulfill there requirements nowadays. At least my T61 does

The so-called "free desktop" is dead, thanks to RH. I think Android helped "Linux on the desktop" more than anything else.

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The only "free desktop" we may have left is BSD and Iilumos based distributions... and RH is working hard to ensure they are ended.

Quite a bold statement; can you clarify? Why would it be dead?

Survival of the fittest.

In the late 90s the Linux/BSD-based desktop was at an uprise with the advent of KDE heavily supported by SuSE, because it had a real technological advantage. But RH was unhappy with the Qt licensing, someone named Miguel de Icaza (who later became a Microsoft employee) successfully split and stalled the effort. It didn't took long and in 2001 with OS X and Windows XP viable alternatives for end-users became available.

Few years later, someone named Marc Shuttleworth tried to revive the Linux desktop and the Vista desaster helped him somewhat. But he was unsucessful, because it wasn't the 90s anymore, inferior DOS and MacOS were dead already, and their successors were good enough. Especially OS X was too much of a competition, regardless of how hard everyone tried to copy their (GUI) ideas. Following in the current decade companies like Adobe and Opera began canceling Linux support, because most of the Linux desktop crowd had moved to OS X.

Today, most "desktop environment" projects are mainly used by their own developers and now they try to copy from mobile OSes. People still using Linux on the desktop talk about how to cope with regular throw-overs and weird design decisions that shall "help the Linux desktop" (topic of this thread), while others just move on to other pastures with predictable roadmaps. Meanwhile embedded Linux invisibly did overtake the world, and the most used Linux-based end-user OS today is Android, which has its own eco-system and doesn't care about RH and their freedesktop.org. So the latter is dead.

Not just Red Hat.

Remember that Qt's owner, Trolltech, was partly owned by Canopy -- the same venture capital outfit that partly owned The SCO Group, which was at the time sueing IBM, Red Hat and others for billions of dollars, and attempting to extort a $700 per seat licence fee from each Linux end user. Ralph Yarro, the Canopy CEO who was thought to have devised this blatant scam, sat on both the SCO board and the Trolltech board. Even when QT was relicensed under the GPL, it was hard to accept this was in good faith when Trolltech's owners were simultaneously arguing in court that the GPL was unconstitutional and invalid [source].

To their credit, Trolltech understood this, and finally got rid of Canopy involvement in 2005. From even before that happy day, Trolltech has been a model of how dual licensing should work. Today, projects are moving from GTK+ to QT, and for good reasons.

Wayland is actually a Good Thing. The thread you must be thinking of is the other popular thread.
Wayland will help the desktop by replacing a complex thing with something that "does one thing".
It won't even do input, that i see is planed for a separate library libinput. So there will be no need to run graphics through a root user.
In my opinion RH is now more of a threat to desktop linux then android.

Exactly that "replacing" is the problem. You can't call something a platform, if their core components get completely replaced every other year by incompatible concepts. Especially if there are a bunch of them competing each other like Mir, Wayland and X11.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png

Did you ever try running some old Loki games?

Maintaining complex existing code is not as fun as starting the next big thing, just to leave it unmaintained behind after few years. Or do you really expect Systemd and Wayland living longer than HAL, except in the paid long-term support offered by RH? I don't.

Do you know why the C programming language (the foundation of the Linux operating system) is almost unchanged since 1989?

Android (AOSP) is is the de-facto desktop Linux, because it is a stable platform (that means interface stability). It is not a threat. It is not GNU, but that is GNU's fault.

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For sure, replacing the 30 years old, not fit for modern machines, X11 is to soon, we should wait a few years more. How did you come to the "every other year"?

X11 had to be refactored and improved incrementally at a faster pace. That's what every other stable platform is doing. But that process is not fun, so it is incompatible with volunteers contributing just for fun. One of the reasons why the "free desktop" movement failed (and XFree86 is dead). Currently the best X11 implementation is the "proprietary X server" developed by nVidia (if there wasn't modular X, nVidia would have their own X server).

I would never have tried Linux in the 90s, if it had started right away with Systemd/Wayland/Mir/whatever instead of network-transparent X11 and proven Unix concepts. Because with that it becomes just another OS/2 or BeOS.
Because that is the expected lifetime of the new half-baked concepts, before they get replaced again.

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wayland was cooked up by Kristian Høgsberg
he was the guy that brought you AIGLX (accelerated indirect desktop cube spinning), so yes he knows how X works
also wayland has support (and feedback and contributions) from many, years long, Xorg devs
and on top of that he is very open to input from DE makers
oh, and he is paid now by intel and intel usually does not f up things (other then instructions sets it seems)

systemd, that i personally... dislike to be political, didn't get input from anyone but GNOME (MIR anyone?)
and was not made by someone who spent years dealing with complex designs
("forget common sense and bash your head against the keyboard")
personal opinion, so ignore if your is not same



and yes i know why C is used for the kernel but a bit of history about C first

back in the decades ago Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were working on Unix
they were writing assembly (the ugly AT&T assembly)
at one time they had to port that OS from a closet sized computer to another closet sized computer
so an idea was born to make a "portable assembly" language

now C is pretty low level so its fairly easy to parse into simple logic (a cpu only has simple logic)
but it's also high level enough to be.. to let humans express themselves in higher logic

like structs for example
a cpu does not know wtf structs are, but they are nice to us humans to organize data
(later cpu's got the LEA instruction to simplify getting a pointer by using a pointer to struct+offset)

"modern", "technologically advanced" languages that are "the future" are faaaaar more high level then C
(and C is already far enough from assembly, its in the golden middle)

i tried writing a small program in a newer C standard (99, 11, don't remember)
it wanted me to write a prototype for every function before the function itself
meaning i had ~50 lines for a 30 line program, 'cuz why not

but i digress

funny enough the kernel has some object orientated design in it (since it is a big state machine)
ask Linus why he doesn't want C++ in it

If those people that do exactly that job for years already decide that X11 is at a point where they can only break its design to come any further, but rather leave it alone and begin writing Wayland instead (yes, most Wayland developers are also Xorg developers) then I personally can live with that, since those people are the ones that should know. Especially since those people explicitly state what is wrong and how they plan to do it in the new protocol.
Network transparent X11 was gone when applications moved on from using Motif as their GUI frameworks. With Qt/GTK/FLTK/whatever the "network transparency" is nothing but a badly implemented VNC. By the way, network transparency can be easily implemented for Wayland, you just need to write a backend for that. Currently the developers spend their resources on getting the protocol to the point they want it to be.
Also, would you like to explain where Wayland is against the Unix philosophy?
You might want to share your insights about expected lifetimes of projects with distro developers, maybe that prevents them from switching to Wayland.