why not use vesa driver as X default?

[Alex Maynard]

On Wed, 23 May 2007, JoeHill wrote:

> 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,

I'm sorry about that -- I didn't realize it had been asked 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.

I'm sure you're right -- probably, I've just had unusual bad luck with
default drivers.

Alex

>
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