[Techtalk] I want Tux Racer dangit

[Caitlyn M. Martin]

Hi, Carla,

Most of what you see as negative I see as extremely positive and a
principled stance by RedHat.  Some distributions, such as RedHat and
Debian, insist on only including GPL friendly Open Source software.  If
a video card requires proprietary, closed drivers it's out.

Other distros simply don't care.  Mandrake would be a good example.  So,
yeah, your video card is fine under Mandrake but not Red Hat.

Other distros actually deliberately imbed proprietary stuff to close
their distro and allow them to change per-seat licensing.  Enter SCO,
Lindows, et al.

By definition, #2 and #3 above will have better hardware support.  The
cost of doing that is the free nature of Linux.  Thanks, but no thanks. 
> 
> Driver issues like this 
> should not happen anymore in the major commercial distros. This is my primary 
> test machine, I had Mandrake and SuSE on it last year, dual-booted and 
> torture-tested, and there were no video card issues. I ran Quake, Tux Racer, 
> and some other shoot em up, didn't have to tweak a thing.

See above.
> 
> I like RH8 as desktop Linux, it does the boring stuff like email/web/type 
> letters/spreadsheets etc quite ably. However they did break some things: 
> first there was the locale issue, now I'm bumping into problems caused by 
> their removing mp3. The reasons sound good, but it leaves us poor users in a 
> bit of a pickle. http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_80mm.html

Don't blame Red Hat for that.  Blame the RIAA and the various patent and
copyright holders for the problem here.  Red Hat is covering themselves
legally.  Again, I think they are doing the smart thing.

Regards,
Caity