Ubuntu Wiki

User comments for the Accelerated X Specification

Comments regarding the Accelerated X Specification are being moved here, in an attempt to separate what needs to go through review/approval, and what can be added into the spec, or can influence the specification in any aspect.

Please note that the only reason why comments have been moved to a separate page is to clean up the specification. *ALL* comments will be reviewed and considered before the specification can be considered Approved.

Comments start here

• I am concerned whether this spec is worth installing binary drivers. I think we will lose our arguments for free graphic drivers by doing so and also shoot other supporters like Fedora or Suse in the back. A small popup informing the user about non-free drivers means nothing when we give our best to make free drivers obsolete on the other hand. -- Pavel Rojtberg
  • Amen to that. -- Hidde Brugmans
  • I think it should be easy to install binary drivers (clicking a button), but not done by default. IMO this is a bad move, kernel hackers will complain and many others, ubuntu should advocate free software but let the end user decide what to do about it's freedom. This should be reconsidered. Also, this conflicts with ubuntu's policy: "2. Licence Freedom. Ubuntu includes only Free Software applications. You are free to modify or change any aspect of your Ubuntu system."-- kmon

  • I too share Pavel's concerns. PLEASE reconsider the choice to install non-free display drivers by default. They are infamous for their instability, and more importantly, installing non-free software that is not absolutely essential for getting a piece of hardware to work is a dangerous road to walk down -- some might ask why flash and google earth can't then just be installed by default as well. This would also be a major loss for the effort of lobbying ATI/AMD and NVidia to free their drivers. And technical concerns aside, frankly, it just feels morally and ethically like a bad and wrong thing to do. --JonasJørgensen

• Legal issues with proprietary modules should also be considered with this. Kororaa, for example, after distributing and enabling proprietary drivers by default, switched back to only providing them optionally due to the unclear legal situation of combining a GPL'd kernel with proprietary modules. -- JakobPetsovits

• Personally, I doubt that enabling these modules by default will have a positive effect on Ubuntu and open source in general in the long term. Even being a mainline distribution, Ubuntu still has not only a commitment, but also a responsibility towards free software. I'd prefer Ubuntu enabling all this eye-candy stuff by default just on free drivers while still educating users, which gives the users an incentive to consider this issue for buying decisions, and keeps (and even strengthens) the incentive for graphics card vendors to provide open sourced drivers. Other distros also manage to enable 3d effects without enabling proprietary drivers by default, why shouldn't Ubuntu be able to do so? -- JakobPetsovits

• Binary drivers out-of-the-box usage only "fixes" problems in the mid-term, in long-term it would make it even worst:

  • No "motivation speech" for companies opening up their drivers, see [http://www.advogato.org/person/Burgundavia/diary.html?start=111 example]

• Binary drivers cant ever be fully supported, if the manufacturer decides to stop updating it to be compatible with the newer version of the kernel/xorg/etc.... (yes they can sign an agreement in which compromise to support security updates of an given version, but software in the Gnu/Linux world is always evolving) and the user goes back to the non compatible hardware status in the following releases of Ubuntu, and even with the binary driver education most users will just ignore the warnings until is too late and they are stuck with hardware they thought would be compatible because worked out-of-the-box or they goggled and appeared as "supported". -- jc87
• Timbobsteve: I think the default installation of binary-drivers is a terrible idea. I understand that people might want an accelerated desktop and it should be supported by Ubuntu (and even possible after rebooting from installation) but I don't think that users who don't use binary-blob drivers should be brushed aside just to make this happen. I don't know much about ubuquity or the installation process, but perhaps another option page could be added to the installer asking the user if they wish to have binary drivers on their system. If they answer yes then the binary packages can be installed, if they say no then they are not installed. That way both parties win. Problems with this idea:
  • Is Xorg.conf generated automatically? If so, can it detect if binary drivers are present and decide to use them?
  • Can the installer detect whether or not to enable Xglx and compiz/beryl depending on the choices made by the user during installation.
  • Can Xglx/compiz/beryl run on open-source drivers? If so, can their be an option after startup to try it.
  • On first boot Xglx could try to start, if it fails then it could default to normal Xorg setup, if it passes then it could start and display a message, like "Do you want to keep this configuration? [Yes/No]"... if they click yes then the system could use Xglx by default. If they select no, or unhappy with the way Xglx runs on their system then the installer could default back to normal Xorg.

• JustinChudgar: I and several of my clients have secondary (from the spare parts box) video cards in their PCs to support dual monitors. This means that there is a high chance of multiple video devices and drivers on one system. I.e. Intel onboard video + Matrox PCI, ATI onboard + NVidia AGP, etc. While the ideal solution would be to get a new board with dual display output, this is not always financially justifiable immediately. What happens when one VGA device is on the whitelist and one is not? Are xinerama, twinview, etc., going to be part of the conf/postconf process?

• airlied: http://lwn.net/Articles/162686/ is all that needs to be said really, the slippy slope starts...

• There's another recent LWN article on exactly that topic. I got Jonathan Corbet's permission to publish it on the Ubuntu wiki already before it becomes available to non-LWN-subcribers, read it at ResistingTheBinaryBlob. He also pointed me to another article published a while ago, [http://lwn.net/Articles/159313/ On binary drivers and stable interfaces]. Please take your time to take a look at them, both are worth a read and the result of in-depth experience with the open source ecosystem. -- JakobPetsovits

• To sum it up:
  • Intel drivers are already free, you don't need to do anything about those.
  • ATI proprietary drivers don't support Composite, so no eye-candy for them anyways, only for the free ATI drivers.
  • NVidia proprietary drivers will be able to be replaced by the free Nouveaux drivers in Feisty+1.

  So essentially, this spec sacrifices Ubuntu's good name as a Free Software citizen and hurts the long-time chances on free drivers, just to enable 3D desktops on one more kind of cards (the NVidia ones) for one release. You should really have another thought if this is really worth it. -- JakobPetsovits, one last time

• I think this is sad. It is also against the Ubuntu philosophy. I don't think it's worth it at all, just for the sake of desktop eye-candy. -- ["towsonu2003"]
• I agree to this idea. Although this may bend the principles of ubuntu and their free software philosophy, it is a necessary step towards bringing ubuntu to the masses. One of the most frequently asked questions in the ubuntu forums are those having to do with setting up the ATI and NVIDIA drivers. By doing so automatically, this would make ubuntu a more user-friendly distro and would appeal to the linux newbies, thus expanding our user base. Even better, it would make the desktop not only faster through accelerated drivers, but it would add in eye candy that people would appreciate, and will help ubuntu rid itself of the widespread "linux is ugly" reputation, which will only spread following the release of Windows Vista and the eyecandy it will bring. I'm all for this idea. However, to satisfy those who refuse to have anything non-free on their desktops, there should be an option in the expert/manual installation mode that allows you to use the free drivers. However, this option to not use the binary drivers should be hidden from the normal installation view, as this would confuse newbies, and they would likely want to have accelerated drivers and eyecandy anyhow.
  • Believing that video binary drivers out of the box are going to be Ubuntu killer feature is wrong, apt IS a killer feature, security IS a killer feature, stability IS a killer feature, freedom to do whatever you want with the software IS a killer feature, etc... eyecandy attracts users to at least try it out, but in the medium/long term it gets boring, also you don't need to show them personally the 3d effects running, videos have the same effect. -- ["jc87"]

  • Even if only Intel cards are supported, this is enough for press articles saying "linux is beautiful" to exist. This will become a stronger motivation for ATI and NVIDIA to publish free drivers or open specifications. One year later we will likely have free drivers to use. Isn't this better? Yes, asking question or prompting a text of BinaryDriverEducation is distracting. But this is our philosophy! Doesn't these "closed" vendors deserve distractions to users of their hardware?

• "this excludes all the newer video boards from ATI, though" -> it excludes only the newest X1300-X1950 range. It should be noticed, that despite various non-clear documentation, the "r300" DRI driver (used by "radeon"/"ati" X.org drivers for newer ATI cards) support both r300 and r400-range cards, meaning essentially 9500 - 9800 and X300 - X800. However, because of a bug in the "ati" driver wrapper, "radeon" may have to be specified explicitly in xorg.conf (see one of the top bugs in xserver-xorg-video-ati). --["TimoJyrinki"]

• Installing proprietary drivers by default (and if it is "only" for some users) in Ubuntu is bad. And I mean very, very bad. We should not give up our freedom for a short term advantage. Or as Benjamin Franklin said: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." --["Rubinstein"]

• "I don't think the world is looking for another shrink-wrapped proprietary desktop environment" - Mark Shuttleworth own words in [http://news.com.com/A+Linux+start-up+on+the+path+to+profits/2008-1012_3-6130484.html?tag=st.num here] , binary drivers available for default would turn Ubuntu in that -- jc87 again

• A poll about this topic has been running on the Ubuntuforums site. As of an hour ago over 1,300 people have voted. Naturally all of the usual caveats regarding surveys and online surveys in particular apply; still, this may give some indication of the community's opinions on this matter. Link: [http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=297392] -- Kripkenstein

• I don't see why people should be warned that they should not install nvidia or ati hardware drivers (as part of BinaryDriverEducation), when they are installed by default, and the user doesn't have any choice in the matter. I also do not think giving up the user's freedom is worth it for a few destracting 3D effects. I very much doubt that 3D desktops qualify as "required", I find they get in the way of work. I am all in favour for a way to install such things (drivers, composite manager) after installation, with a simple tick box after the non-freeness is conveyed with some kind of dialogue box. I think this move will cause you to lose the support of some of Ubuntu's long time supporters (I am one, since WartyWarthog).-- BruceCowan

• If you install Windows, most probably you get a barely working driver installed by default and then you install a better driver from your vendor. Microsoft also doesn't install the driver that doesn't pass its compatibility test or isn't compatible with its licensing terms. Why Ubuntu cannot simply reject those drivers which doesn't conform to its requirement for freedom? I concur that we need to make sure installing 3rd party drivers isn't disastrously difficult, yet it cannot be easier than it should be. -- AlanTam

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