how nvidia impedes free desktop adoption
There has been quite some discussion about Free and closed drivers and documentation of hardware lately. Kernel developers demand open drivers, docs and development processes, NVidia refuses to open their drivers, arguing that the technical quality is not a problem, and that the driver contains intellectual property they wish to protect. Now ATI/AMD has shown that the intellectual property argument is at least not universally applicable to graphics hardware vendors. Let's also clear up a misconception about the technical quality of nvidia.ko: The NVidia driver is the single component in a KDE4 / Free Operating system stack causing us most of the hard-to-solve problems. In other words, nvidia.ko has grave technical shortcomings.
Let's not forget to pin down at least some of the technical problems as detailed as possible. Two of the most annoying problems I am myself able to reproduce:
* Temporary screen lockups. Suffering from this myself, I've done some research on the web. There were suggestions around that NVidia locks the system for some seconds when switching between powerstates. Disabling powermanagement through a kernel module parameter should have done the trick, it didn't do it here. Besides that, I would not feel comfortable with that, having a passively cooled video card and at least trying to not burn too much energy these days. Global climate change and local one (it's already quite hot in this room) getting in the way.
* Bad windows resizing performance. Resizing a transparent konsole window takes approximately 5 seconds here. It's slightly better with a non-transparent mode (and other applications), but still far worse than on my ATI card, and also far worse than in KDE3. Switching virtual desktops here (composited or not) takes some seconds, just enough to break my flow of working.
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