why not use vesa driver as X default?

[JoeHill]

Alex Maynard left a post-it on the fridge:

> Based on some recent ubuntu installs where everything else
> "just worked" but X-windows (and the whole system) "just froze" I'm
> wondering why the drive in xorg.conf doesn't default to a more robust
> (if non-optimal) driver like vesa? There could always be a clear option to
> switch to a video card specific driver, but why not default to something that
> "just works" so as not to scare off new users?
> 
> Thanks to the good suggestion from one of the experts on this list,
> switching to vesa solved the problem for me twice on two different
> computers-- but as a newby-level user I would never have known to try that
> without outside help, which is kind of the point I am trying to make.
> 
> Probably there are some good reasons for the current defaults that I don't
> know about, but given all the recent posts about the "just works" aspects
> of linux I thought I would put that out as a question.

From what I've garnered in seeing this exact question a few times before, the
prevailing opinion seems to be that the benefit of doing what you suggest would
be outweighed by the costs. This is based on the idea that if vesa were
default, the resulting display characteristics on newer NVidia and ATI cards
would be clearly sub par. IIANM, the vesa driver does not support most/any of
the features on recent video cards, and the result would, as I say, be more
detrimental than any conceivable gain from defaulting to vesa.

-- 
JoeHill
++++++++++++++++++++
"Are you all right?" -Leela 
"Ah, it's nothing a a law suit won't cure." -Bender 
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