Re: OT: Seeking Advice on Purchasing a Laptop
> 1. Proprietary drivers are generally written by the folks who know the
> product the best, and so have the best chance of working without bugs.
Obvious. But some free drivers are also made by people which know the
hardware, when it's specifications are free.
> 2. Unless you intend to modify the driver yourself by modifying the
> underlying code, why should you care if it's proprietary?
Honestly, I do not mind the full freedom point.
But proprietary softwares are real, technical limitations.
Examples: NVidia's drivers does not support randr. Opera does not
integrates well with the desktop.
> 3. Probably come in both deb and rpm form, so should install easily on
most systems.
Of proprietary softwares that run well on GNU/linux, I can see 2:
_ NVidia drivers
_ opera browser
The first one only provide a ".run" binary, in the windows's way. It is
boring as hell to install.
The second one provides .deb, and it is very easy to install/update.
It is a little like softwares you have installed but are not present in
the official distro's repos: some are nicely made, others are tricky.
> 4. May even have instructions, which is more than can be said for most
Linux software!
Instructions are present in both free and non-free softwares. But for most
free softwares, it covers more special cases and/or the community is
bigger or have better technical knowledge.
> 5. If it works when you install it, there should be no reason
> *ever* to update it. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
> --Ann Landers
Hum. So, while you do not notice a problem by yourself, you will not fix it?
I can not agree: I have not enough time to spend in the plethora of
softwares installed here to follow lists and test bugs.
And proprietary softwares are not always very communicative on problems
they have.
But I think the free way is not the way to go for some kinds of softwares,
if their developers wants to live from their work (an example would be
off-line games).
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