Trigger Finger

From Digg.com
“Ubuntu CTO Matt Zimmerman has announced two Ubuntu Technical Board decisions that will affect the upcoming Feisty Fawn release, due out in April of this year. For the Feisty release, proprietary video drivers are out of the default install, and the PowerPC port of Ubuntu is being downgraded to an unofficial release.”

Personally I think this is terrible news. The most common complaint I see, and usually the first request for help from a new Linux user, is “How do I get hardware acceleration for my super duper graphics card.” Though progress has been made in simplifying the procedure in recent years, it’s still a daunting prospect for a new Linux user to go editing xorg.conf files, one that normally goes wrong for a mis-capitalised character or other simple mistake. However this simple mistake usually leads to losing their GUI and being dumped at a command line, and that gives a terrible first impression at a very early stage to these people looking to adopt an open source OS.
I had high hopes that (despite the moral debate) for once user accessability would overcome hard-headedness… but alas it was not to be.

read more | digg story

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