[Discuss] Unable to boot after nvidia install

[Scott Dowdle]

Rob,

----- Original Message -----
> It's a mess in my opinion compared to other Linux distributions.

Now for the apologetic in me to kick in...

I think the difference between Fedora and others is that Fedora doesn't really make any effort to keep the user from installing the wrong driver.  They are out of it completely.  As a result, it is just as easy to install the wrong driver as it is the right one... but when you get it wrong, yeah there is a mess to clean up.  As long as you can figure out what the install does and reverse the process... it shouldn't be too much trouble... but no... no fun at all.  That's kind of the problem with out-of-tree, proprietary drivers... if it breaks you get to keep all of the pieces... and that's one of the two main reasons I avoid hardware that requires proprietary drivers.

So, I can empathizes with people when they are in few situations:

1) Their hardware doesn't work at all with the stock xorg / kernel drivers

2) Their hardware works but performs very poorly for normal stuff... like dragging a window around or video playback

3) They are wanting to setup a gaming rig with or without Steam... and only a small percentage of games will work with the stock drivers

#1 and #2 are especially painful when working with a laptop because it of the inability to yank the card out and replace it with a better supporeted one.

So what category do you fall in?  If it is one where the stock driver works fairly well but you just want more performance... but not for any particular reason... I say bag the whole concept of using a proprietary driver all together.

If you are wanting to setup a gaming rig... maybe go with a different distro that is more geared for that like SteamOS... or whatever.  Actually I don't recommend that... I recommend just using a gaming console.  I don't like to admit that because people don't want to hear that and I'm recommending a closed source / non-free software ecosystem in that case... but not very different from Steam in that case.

> And never mind the ease of doing so for someone coming over from a 
> Windows computer or even OSX.

While it has probably gotten better... I've run into quite a few instances with Windows where Windows basically broke or refused to work properly with the driver that Microsoft or the hardware maker provided.

The Mac OS X comparison isn't really fair (not that the consumer market cares about fairness) because OS X only works with a small set of hardware... maybe 1% of what Linux works with and I think that is an under exaggeration.  If Apple tried to go after the "generic PC hardware market" (like Linux does every day), OS X would explode into a completely unworkable product instantly.  Does OS X do a better job on Apple hardware that Linux... definitely... but how big of an accomplishment is that?

Remember, breaking stuff... and surviving beyond it... is how we learn.  While I've avoided most of your particular pain... I've encountered plenty of it in other areas over the years.

BTW, the Korora Project (a Fedora remix distro) has been working on a proprietary hardware detection and driver installation tool named Pharlap.  I've heard it works well in some situations but not so well in others.  I wonder what if any documentation they offer.  They are basically a shim between Fedora an rpmfusion... trying to make it harder to install the wrong driver.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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