elementary OS

Why use Proprietary Drivers by default?

Asked by Lucas Caldwell

Here's a suggestion: Why are you shipping the ISO with Restricted Drivers? Isn't that against an EULA somewhere? (lol) You should include the Open Source ones and let users go Proprietary on their own. I know this wont solve all the problems, but it's a bit better than getting cranky Proprietary Drivers to work. They seem to have a bit of issues, or need tinkering before they cooperate. This may not be relevant as I have no way of installing with stable drivers other than making my own ISO, so I don't know that would effect the situation (experimental 304/310 vs. Stable vs. Nouveau)

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Lucas Caldwell (sitherah) said : 		#1

Also, not trying to be ignorant. I am aware that other Card Vendors exist, just trying to give an idea.

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David Gomes (davidgomes) said : 		#2

Well, I am +1 on shipping with FOSS drivers, and I thought that's what we were doing.

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David Gomes (davidgomes) said : 		#3

Also, I think I pressed "Answer", I meant to Just Add a Comment.

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Cody Garver (codygarver) said : 		#4

We only ship with free drivers. These bugs have various sources. Some are due to the 3.2 kernel's hardware support, some happen when you install proprietary drivers AFTER installing the OS. Worst of all, some are just plain mysteries.

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Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel) said : 		#5

We'll have to use whatever works best as long as we're legally allowed to do that. Proprietary AMD drivers are crap so we have to blacklist them (bug 1017091). Proprietary Nvidia drivers are more stable than Nouveau so we'd prefer to use them by default, but that's a Luna+1 work item (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elementaryos/+spec/automatic-nonfree-driver-installation).

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ainq (ainq) said : 		#6

Most NVIDIA Fermi and Kepler cards can only boot in safe mode with beta1, so rather than forcing VESA on a set of blacklisted cards from NVC0+, it would be better to simply ship proprietary drivers by default.

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