The State of Laptop Linux In 2005

jg21 writes "LinuxWorld's senior editor James Turner reports this month on what he calls The State of Laptop Linux in 2005 and says it's a lot better than it was in 2004, but adds - after conducting his own new test to see if any Linux distro is yet really laptop-ready: "What's needed to make things better? Well, the Linux community needs to address the device driver crisis." Turner acknowledges that binary-only drivers are a sore spot with free software purists, but says he'd "rather have a fully functional, if closed, Nvidia driver than a reverse-engineered one that limps along." Overall though he concludes that widespread laptop Linux is much closer now."

Comments

Re:Closed drivers.

[cheesybagel]

NVIDIA's binary drivers are shit. Speaking from personal experience, I have had all sorts of funny things happening with them. Including bash misteriously crashing and gcc sigsegvs. This indicates the drivers were corrupting the memory of other apps. They sure are fast for OpenGL, and I wish Linux had good open source OpenGL drivers. But it doesn't. Luckily I do not do any 3D work, or otherwise I might be forced to actually use them more. The open source drivers which came with my distro are really stable albeith only 2D.

Until Linux device drivers are insulated from each other the way programs are thanks to the help of the MMU, this sort of thing will continue to happen with binary drivers, and other poorly written drivers.