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The Future of Windows Graphic Technology
Ben writes 'Extremetech has an article discussing the future of Windows graphics technology. The article uses information from presentations at the recent WinHEC, and outlines the Windows Graphics Foundation and other technologies expected to make an appearance in Longhorn. Particularly interesting is the Longhorn Display Driver Model: 'With it, Microsoft is aiming for that ideal situation of 'graphics just works.' For example, if you upgrade a graphics driver today, you typically have to reboot the system. One example of the 'graphics just works' mantra is one of LDDM's goals of allowing installation of graphics drivers without needing to restart the system.'
For example, if you upgrade a graphics driver today, you typically have to reboot the system. One example of the 'graphics just works' mantra is one of LDDM's goals of allowing installation of graphics drivers without needing to restart the system.
Didn't I hear the same "no rebooting" line with Win2k and with WinXP? Not that I wouldn't enjoy that, it's just that I've lost faith in these types of claims.
-Valiss
How often does the average user update the video drivers in Windows? Do they really care that it requires a reboot? I would guess that less than 0.1% of my Windows reboots are prompted by updating the video drivers.
how often do you load a new grafics driver?
I am amazed at how many software packages still require a reboot. IMHO this is much more annoying.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I can certainly understand refusing to reboot a server that needs to be on 24/7. Fine. But why do people get their panties in a bunch over rebooting their own personal machines? I run Fedora Core 3, yes it takes minutes for it to boot up, but when I do I usually don't sit there staring at it. When I turn my computer on in the morning I do something else while booting up, like brush my teeth. This development manager friend of mine looked at me strangely when I kept rebooting my laptop to fix networking issues. Why do you reboot your machine so much? Because I don't know how to selectively start and restart processes. Because I don't know which ones to start and restart. With names like ntpd, how would one know? If I restart processes, don't others depend on them? Won't they get hosed? Etc. Etc. Or I can waste a whole five minutes of my life not worrying about those things and just reboot the damn thing. And chat with my friends in the meanwhile.
And you don't see how that is confusing as hell to the 'average joe' user? Hell, it's confusing to me, and I've been programming since I was seven years old... and that means I've been doing it for over 2 decades...
Until Linux gets over their archaic install issues it'll never take off in a big way in consumer land.
(And yes, I like Linux, I try to have as much here at my workplace running on Linux when it makes sense... it's just not user friendly.)
Are you implying that you have to reboot Linux in order to install the video driver? You certainly don't but then again to all the "but you don't have to rebootpeople -- you do have to restart X, which is something of a pain if you don't have a good session manager. To the desktop user, a crashed X is just as destructive as a crashed kernel, and likewise a restart of X is just as interruptive as having to reboot.
I'd imagine that some code to 'ssupend/resume' the state of X might be a pretty neat project to undertake, but I'm not sure anyone has done it yet..
First, linux requires you to deal with source code. Fine for you techheads out there. Bad for consumers unless it is *invisible* (i.e. just part of the install process that they dont see), and right now it just aint - at least not on all distros.
Second, (and this one's just going to eat at Open source people) - many companies dont want to release their source code. It was hard to write, and often they had to invest millions to create it. Why should they release it for free?
I'm not going to start a flame war by arguing that this is right or wrong. It just is. I need to be able to create a single binary and installer that I can release to the linux world and expect it to work across (at least) most distros and recent versions. Thats commercial reality.
MS have got it right only because they have a slow moving platform and no fragmentation. You wrote a driver in 2000 for windows 2000. In 2001 you needed to update it for XP. The linux world is very fast moving - here we are preparing to take on the 12th release of the 2.6 tree - and that has created issues for driver manufacturers.