Non sequitur: Sunday, Monday, Linux… epic fail?
These are the recent bits of the story on how I couldn’t yet have on my Acer TravelMate a Linux distro (or any other OS) I am satisfied with.
The previous episode ended where I wasn’t happy with the horrendous Intel video performance in Ubuntu Jaunty, nor was the downgrade to the version 2.4 of the driver acceptable — I had a fatal crash once, while version 2.2 of the driver never crashed.
Obviously, the developers of the Intel video drivers should be skinned alive, because they simply ruined newer X.Org distributions:
- They screwed the EXA (and the older XAA) support in newer versions of the driver.
- By moving parts of the driver in the kernel, they made decent performance dependent of the latest commits in the newest kernels, thus severely affecting Ubuntu 9.04, Fedora 11, Mandriva 2009.1, openSUSE Factory.
- They don’t intend to fix EXA, instead they discontinue it by moving exclusively to UXA, which is currently as broken as KDE 4.0.0 was.
- In short, the the developers of the Intel video drivers for X.Org are simply ruining people’s confidence in Linux (or everything non-Windows and non-Mac), especially knowing that business laptops don’t need fancy Nvidia chipsets, but rather cheap Intel ones.
As an interim conclusion, relying on LTS/Enterprise distros should fix the issue, as they feature older (and working!) versions of the Intel video driver.
Now, for practical reasons I won’t recount the things in the exact order they happened.
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