Bug#749264: No nvidia-driver working

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 08/08/2014 12:43 PM, Karsten Malcher wrote:
> Fact is that it is impossible to simply upgrade an system without thrown
> back into an text shell!

Well, blame nVidia for their shitty driver, but please don't blame
us Debian people. The proprietary driver is really difficult to
handle owed to the fact that most parts are closed source and
only a small fraction of it, the kernel module glue or shim code,
is open source.

We can't really fix things which are binary-only. The proprietary
driver is really a bitch to maintain and you should be aware
that for most Debian Developers, the maintainer job is something
they do in their free time and they're not getting paid for it.

As for that matter, I am using the free nouveau driver and I never
run into any upgrade issues. So, you can either use the free driver
or don't use an nVidia card on Linux at all. As I said, you are
barking up the wrong tree.

> (And often you loose the ability for sound and other multimedia too).

How is that related to the nVidia driver?

> This can happen also after an simple upgrade in the same distribution
> version.
> I have installed Linux (Kubuntu and Debian) on the PC's of two normal
> users.
> First they where very happy to get rid of the world of windows terror.
> But now both where back to windows because it is unacceptable to get an
> unusable PC after an simple upgrade!

Well, my mom has been rocking Ubuntu on her Asus eeePC for quite
a while now and she never complained.

> In jessie im am feeling the same way, because nothing seems to work.
> No X, chaotic kernel versions and everything seems to loose in chaos.

Well, Jessie is a *testing* distribution and therefore unreleased. You
shouldn't actually be using it unless you know what you are doing. If
you want something *stable*, you should actually use Debian stable
and not testing.

I mean, you are not using beta versions of MacOS X or Windows either,
are you?

> Maybe wheezy is the last usable Debian version you can really work with.

That's probably related to the fact that Debian Wheezy *is* actually
a current stable release.

> I hope you will understand what i want to say?

Well, you are complaining about beta software breaking your system
if I am getting this right.

> But i am talking about the reasons why Linux have no chance to get an
> accepted OS to work with.

Look, I don't actually care what people consider an accepted OS. Where
I work, we deploy Debian Wheezy on over 150 desktops and since we are
running a stable version, we are hardly having any issues. In fact, we
usually have less issues than with the Windows 7 machines that we
deploy as well.

> Is it only intended for server use?

Is this supposed to be a flame bait? Again, you are using third-party
software (the proprietary nVidia driver) together with a beta version
of Debian. Why are you complaining?

>> That's already enough to get X up and running with the proprietary
>> drivers. The rest can be configured using xrandr.
> 
> I tried it but it does not work.
> Please remember that i set up a new clean installation.

Then you should consider filing a bug report against nVidia's bug
tracker, if there is something like that, since we have no way
to fix bugs in closed-source software.

> When nouveau is really the intended standard, then we need no modern
> PC's with 3D graphic cards any more.

Well, I'm using nouveau and I'm happy with it.

> In wheezy it is working with all graphic power!

Again, Wheezy is *stable*, Jessie is *testing*. What's your point?

>> Can I assume the bug report to be invalid and close it?
> 
> You can assume that this package is not usable - sorry.
> The only chance maybe is to use the original drivers from NVidia.

You are not really providing a useful bug report which would help
us fixing actual bugs. Thus, I would rather consider closing this
bug report or at least tag it with "moreinfo" since the information
you provided does not really reveal any bugs to me.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913