Chromium blacklists Nouveau - <AUTHOR> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2019-January/031798.html <comment><USER2> For anyone interested, the link really should be the full bug report: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=876523](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=876523)

The current link says it as if Chrome was not being fair, but reading their reasoning it makes total sense. Key quote from said bug report:

> We thought about blacklisting nouveau driver long time ago, and decided to > let more adventurous users to play around. Now that Ubuntu ships with > nouveau on default, maybe it's time to blacklist it in Chrome.

> We received quite some bug reports on other rendering issues with Nouveau, > and this bug is just one of them. So we will disable all GPU acceleration by > default. If someone wants to bypass that, there are two options: 1) install > proprietary NVidia drivers (see #24) 2) run Chrome with --ignore-gpu- > blacklist, but be aware you are taking a risk here

> Unfortunately we don't have the resources to test every variation of every > GPU/driver combination on linux, let alone investigate & fix bugs in > drivers. We want a stable & secure browser first, a GPU-accelerated one > second, only if possible.

> The default driver on Ubuntu LTS has severe issues, asking non-technical > users to update their driver is just not acceptable as a prerequisite to use > Chrome.

> If someone is interested in well-scoping the brokenness (version range > and/or devices affected), we're happy to take a patch to the blacklist.

So the driver fails in some (common enough) cases, they let it run anyway but now it's default on ubuntu so a lot of non tech users are/will be affected, so they block it but you can still bypass the block if you want. And if newer version fix it and someone can help them figure out which versions work for what, they are willing to limit the blocking.

<comment><USER3> >> Unfortunately we don't have the resources to test every variation of every GPU/driver combination on linux

So Google _doesn 't have_ the resources to test the default driver on the most widespread linux distribution for one of the two most widespread GPU producers in the market.

<comment><USER4> Not for a free product, no. It's not our place to decide for Google what they want to do. If we want our open source software to work we should make it work. You can rebuild chromium to change the blacklist, or just use the command line to tell it to ignore the blacklist. It's not like Google doesn't provide options.

And in any case the reason nouveau sucks (and yes, folks, nouveau sucks) isn't Google's fault to begin with.

You seriously want to complain about Google's lack of support for an open source driver that barely exists because of NVIDIA's lack of support?

<comment><USER5> It's free in the sense you don't pay for it with money, but considering how much Google pays apple to use Google as the default search engine, I would say the Google Browser is a big money maker.

<comment><USER4> No, Chromium is free in the GNU sense, which is what I meant. You don't whine at open source providers to support features you want, it's bad form. Go fix it yourself, or use hardware that doesn't require this kind of hacky reverse engineering.

<comment><USER6> > You don't whine at open source providers to support features you want, it's > bad form. Go fix it yourself

This just about sums up the problem with open source. The response is always "if you don't like it, fix it yourself". Because everybody is a developer with copious free time to learn how to fix the problem in their favorite product. It's not like cloning and building Chromium takes hours. Or like you would lose anything by using Chromium instead of Chrome.

<comment><USER7> I don't see what the issue here is. If you don't have the time to do it then get someone else to do it. If they won't do it for free then you pay them. The unfortunate part is that if you regularly buy brand new Nvidia cards then the cost of the proprietary driver is built into the price of the card, so it sucks that you would have to pay twice for drivers. But this clearly is a result of Nvidia's decision, they are thes one who are forcing you to take personal responsibility for getting your own libre drivers working, not the developers working on said libre (and gratis) drivers.

<comment><USER6> Sorry for the confusion, I see mentioning Chromium by name made my comment a bit misleading. I was responding to the parent comment (not to the original post) and using Chromium as an example of how it's unrealistic to ask users to fix things themselves when using OSS. I was not trying to comment on Google's decision on this particular issue here (though I have mild thoughts on that too).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author, Ilia, noticed that this is on HN and responded in the mailing list thread. I don't know if I agree with the take, but I'll repost because I found it interesting.

\---

 _I 've glanced at the HN discussion about this situation [...] and it does seem like people are focusing on the wrong thing... the important bit isn't that nouveau crashes and burns in some situations—everyone already knew that, including the users of nouveau who continue to use it nonetheless. It's that if every piece of software feels free to ignore a system integrator's or user's wishes, then the user now has to know how to override that behaviour separately in every application. The situation is that Distro X has decided that nouveau is the right thing for its users. A user can disable that by uninstalling or otherwise disabling nouveau if they wish. But now chrome comes along with its own set of rules. What if every application starts doing that?

It should also be noted that outside of a few pathological cases, like creating 2GB+ textures which never happens in practice, nouveau works just fine for me. For other people, it dies at random intervals, irrespective of whether they're using chrome or not. While this is a non-ideal scenario, chrome shouldn't be in the business of worrying about things like that. It just confuses the situation for everyone._

<comment><USER9> > every piece of software feels free to ignore a system integrator

Yes, they do and they have very good reasons for it. Working with distros to ensure they ship the right libraries takes an infinite amount of effort so companies that what to ship a product to their users will work around it.

This also happens in the server space with the massive popularity of containers and language-specific package managers.

The traditional Linux Distro model is extremely flawed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nouveau are doing their best to reverse-engineer cards. NVIDIA doesn't help at all, not providing any docs and not interacting with the rest of the community. On the other hand, Intel and AMD have high-quality drivers and are part of the open-source community.

<comment><USER11> Ya. It's too bad their hardware isn't more competitive. I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market.

Things are getting far better for OSS you drivers. If you wanted any 3d acceleration in the past your only choice was the proprietary Nvidia driver or a broken proprietary ATI driver. (The ATI windows drivers were pretty buggy too during this period).

Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering.

<comment><USER12> > I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in > the CPU market.

Don't set your expectations too high. Their next generation of consumer graphics cards, rumored to be announced at CES next week, are reportedly still going to be based on a new revision of their current GCN architecture (which originally debuted in 2011 and is very much showing its age these days). Rumored performance for the "high-end" model will be somewhere around the GTX 1080 or RTX 2070 (though reportedly at a much lower price compared to either of those cards).

If you're waiting for them to produce an all-new GPU architecture the rumors are that they are working on one to be launched in the 2020-2021 timeframe. That's also when Intel is rumored to be preparing to launch their own dedicated GPUs so hopefully we will be going from 0 properly high-end GPUs with open-source drivers to 2 by 2021.

<comment><USER13> I got an amd fury x a while back because the nvidia binary drivers regressed severely with my old card, and I wanted 4K anyway.

It's by far the best Linux GPU I've ever encountered, and that's with open source drivers don't set the kernel taint bit.

Its performance in benchmarks was much better than the comparably priced NVIDIA. It is also the quietest gamer GPU I've encountered (I bought one with slightly nicer fans).

Maybe things have changed (but the 1080 was certainly out back then), but this card wins on every metric other than CUDA support (nonexistent) and absolute performance (close enough to fastest, and certainly overkill for my Linux Steam collection at 4K).

<comment><USER12> I'm not saying that AMD's current cards are slouches (I'm planning to buy one myself this year when I build my next computer) but they certainly do not meet the performance bar set by Nvidia's current high-end models (the RTX 2080 Ti and Titan RTX) which is what I mean by "properly high-end". Those are admittedly niche products due to their high pricing but it is important for AMD to have a competitive product in that segment since many people don't do a lot of research and if all they know about GPUs is "Nvidia has the fastest cards" (or an equally-uninformed salesperson tells them that) and buys a 1060 over a 580 based on that "knowledge" then AMD lost a sale.

<comment><USER14> > they certainly do not meet the performance bar set by Nvidia's current high- > end models

Assuming you can't tell the difference between, say, 100fps and 150fps, isn't the 'performance bar' a bit arbitrary after a certain point if the hardware runs the vast majority of the software thrown at it?

<comment><USER12> Objectively you are correct. However, as the rest of my comment indicates there are important marketing and brand-value perception reasons to have a true high-end card: how many professional gamers (streamers, e-sports, extreme overclockers, etc.) who _do_ buy this class of GPU are there playing with AMD cards vs Nvidia cards? How many (tens/hundreds of) millions of views do they collectively get playing games with Nvidia hardware? Nvidia has likely gotten millions of dollars in effectively free marketing just for having these cards.

AMD's GPU market share has been shrinking with the general gaming audience despite the fact that their mid-range cards have been very price-competitive with Nvidia's offerings during the same time period they've lacked serious competition at the high-end. While focusing on the mid-range where the highest volume of GPUs are sold is the rational market strategy it may not be a winning market strategy in the real world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Both projects seem to put the blame on the other project. IMO, there are at least two other factions that can be blamed equally well.

First, nvidia for not providing OSS drivers and second, the user who runs an OS on hardware that can't be properly supported on this OS at the moment.

For years I have the rule that I prefer hardware that has proper Linux support. Even going a bit further that I try not to buy hardware that doesn't have OSS drivers unless there really is no other option (nowadays, that means mostly smartphones).

<comment><USER16> > nvidia for not providing OSS drivers

It's worse than this. Nvidia does not merely _not provide_ open source drivers, they actively preclude work on Nouveau.

Phoronix link: [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau- XDC2017)

<comment><USER15> Ouch, that's mean. IMHO the only way to react to that is to close down shop. Ideally including Linux throwing out support for Nvidia cards.

I have a strong opinion on this as I was involved a few years ago in the Kindle homebrew community. After a while I decided that my time could be used better than on a product by a company that tries to prevent us from making his product better and more interesting to its users.

There is so much energy and time wasted when you have to fight against the manufacturing company and in the case of a graphics card, the result is that it just works as well as the other graphics card option that is fully supported OOTB. And then that's just for a piece of hardware that you can replace on average for a few hundred bucks.

Is that really worth the hassle?

<comment><USER17> I've personally actively avoided buying anything with Nvidia hardware in it for 8 years now because of how awful their software business is. That has meant I've even skipped over tablets and phones using their chips and will never buy a Nintendo Switch because... well... firstly consoles are bullshit crippling perfectly good computers with proprietary OSes but secondly because it has an Nvidia chip in it.

I tell everyone I know not to buy Nvidia, I have built gaming computers both professionally and for family that I've actively advised against buying Nvidia parts for because of their business practices, and when I buy notebooks its a real PITA to get one without some Nvidia GPU in it but I do that too.

But Linux cannot "throw out" support for Nvidia. Nvidias driver is wholly independent of Linux, its why its such a PITA to work with. Its a DKMS blob driver and way too much other useful stuff depends on that interface to break it just to stop Nvidia. Fortunately nobody is going out of their way to support Nvidia either, such as their stupid attempt to fragment Wayland development with eglstreams nonsense.

The most valuable thing any of us can do is constantly decry Nvidia for being the reprehensible company they are and use what influence we have over those we know to distance them from buying their products the same way you should distance friends and family from buying Nestle or Exxon products or should avoid shopping at Walmart.

<comment><USER18> What's bad about Nestle? I know their products are very expensive, but aside from that? Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER19> Among the most recent ones, lobbying for water privatization: [https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=nestle+water+pr...](https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=nestle+water+privatization)

And the usual reliance on Palm Tree Oil, as another example

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd say, if you care about using open source driver, you'd avoid Nvidia to begin with, and use AMD or Intel instead.

Here is a very good post from one of the key Nouveau developers, about why you should do exactly that:

[https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x- org-d...](https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org- drivers/open-source-nvidia-linux-nouveau/998310-nouveau-persevered- in-2017-for-open-source-nvidia-but-2018-could-be-much- better?p=998316#post998316)

<comment><USER21> AMD cards for anything advanced are crap, they couldn't recogize one of my monitor (>2 monitor setup), and they're not playing fair with their AMF extension on Linux (works great on Windows though). Even on Windows, I cannot get the card to properly get my minitor resolutions (it's sitting beyond a multiplexer, though there no problem with nvidia).

<comment><USER20> AMD cards work just fine. Not sure what kind of issues you are having with your dual monitor. May be you are using an ancient kernel?

What's an AMF extension?

<comment><USER21> Triple monitor on two physical screen, and no AMD cards do not work, in this case using the display port output and DVI->HDMI adapter, and yes, it works with a third _physical_ monitor (not acceptable in my setup). Nvidia/nouveau are not showing these problems.

AMF == Advanced Media Framework.

<comment><USER20> On Linux you have vaapi for hardware encoding.

AMF doesn't seem to have a Linux version to begin with, so not sure what you were testing exactly: [https://github.com/GPUOpen- LibrariesAndSDKs/AMF/issues/4](https://github.com/GPUOpen- LibrariesAndSDKs/AMF/issues/4)

<comment><USER21> HEVC hardware encoding is not supported by "amdgpu" VAAPI libs (tested about 6 month ago with an RX560, did _you_ get it working ?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> NVidia comes out of this looking very bad. It's not as if a GPU can't have good Linux support (see AMD, Intel), but theirs doesn't. Although I haven't spent my hard-earned money on their hardware since 2005, I have several machines at work that are burdened with it. Some lock up with Nouveau drivers, others crash with NVidia drivers. I can only conclude that the hardware is unstable.

<comment><USER23> Then it is good. The worse NVIDIA public image is - the better.

<comment><USER22> The problem from my perspective is that a major GPU vendor seems to think it's appropriate to paper over hardware problems with proprietary drivers, and they get away with it. While their reputation ought to suffer for that, I'd rather see them mend their ways. I'd love to take NVidia off _my_ blacklist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's not the Chromium team's job to debug nouveau. Switching it to be the default for everything was obviously premature.

<comment><USER25> Yet I use Firefox with Nouveau just fine...

<comment><USER26> It works on my machine, ship it!

<comment><USER25> Uh no, means that you can make it work and some people are willing to spend the time to do it right. You'd think that if Mozilla can afford to do this so could Google. The only way the problems in the drivers can get fixed is through usage, if Chrome flat out refuses to work with the driver then the issues can't be fixed.

This also illustrates why it's important to have alternatives to Chrome for anybody who cares about open source.

<comment><USER24> I assess with high confidence that that was a satirical comment.

It could be working on FF only through a quirk in their rendering, rather than a testing. Chrome certainly has a test suite -- did anyone run it with nouveau and turn bugs into PRs? And arguably, that job belongs to the desktop owners, as well as the nouveau and chromium teams. Browsers are insanely complicated, and who is paying for this work?

If I could make my employer pay for a meaningful number of Ubuntu desktop licences I would, but TBH I need it to work with the nVidia driver not nouveau.

<comment><USER25> Maybe it's working through a quirk, or maybe Firefox team writes better code that handles a wider range of drivers. I choose to use Firefox because the team behind it cares about my needs. If Google can't afford to make a browser that works with open source drivers, I will simply choose not to use it and encourage others to use Firefox instead. This is precisely why having alternatives to Chrome is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't this the key quote:

> I did run the WebGL CTS suite, but that resulted in some

> hangs from the the max-texture-size-equivalent test, and some

> browser-level weirdness after some tests where later tests all fail

> (due to what I have to assume is a browser bug).

Isn't it more likely that they are noveau bugs, and are part of the problem here?

<comment><USER28> > hangs from the the max-texture-size-equivalent tes

I reported this bug back in 2015 and they have made no progress on it. It seems Nouveau just doesn't have the resources or man power. I can't really blame Google here. You don't want the browser to be able to hard lock system(not even a Magic SysRq will reboot it)

[1] [https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92136](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92136)

<comment><USER29> > You don't want the browser to be able to hard lock system(not even a Magic > SysRq will reboot it)

Wait, this isn't just rendering bugs a la "some WebGL things will show green instead of red", it kills your system entirely?

I thought the only effect this blacklisting had was making WebGL unavailable for everyone instead of buggy for a small minority. This just flipped my opinion.

Related, this might also explain the strange bluescreen bug my girlfriend had with Windows 8 + Firefox on her laptop. She switched to Google Chrome a few years ago because every time she used Firefox, her laptop would bluescreen within a few hours (either while Firefox was still running, or at some point later). I didn't know bugs outside of the OS could still do that kind of thing (I thought they started squashing such bugs with Windows 95 and finished somewhere around Vista) and wrote the Firefox thing off as triggering some extremely obscure Windows OS-level issue. Maybe I should check if there is a driver blacklisted by Chrome, though it seems more likely Chrome just doesn't happen to trigger it (like all other software running on it, it really is only Firefox).

<comment><USER8> Driver crashes can easily take down a system. That's why driver quality matters so much. This is true on every OS. (Although, Windows 7+ has mechanisms to help recover from GPU driver crashes specifically, which _usually_ work.)

Also, Chrome can render WebGL on the CPU. It's slower but will still work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Doesn't hardware accelerated graphics on Firefox on Linux require modifying a preference? AFAIK you need to go to about:config and enable layers.acceleration.force-enabled. (This is speaking as someone who uses Firefox on Linux as my main browser.)

The bug for enabling hardware rendering by default on some systems appears to still be open: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876)

<comment><USER20> Yes, Firefox is stuck with blacklisting basically everything. I guess developers didn't revisit drivers situation in the recent times.

Just set these in your $HOME/.profile

        export MOZ_WEBRENDER=1
        export MOZ_ACCELERATED=1

<comment><USER31> Please don't encourage people to turn on WebRender without at least warning them that it is experimental, still under development, can cause your computer to blow up, etc. Also the environment variables you specified will force it on even on non-Nightly builds which is _very_ undesirable since those builds are not getting fixes uplifted.

(I work on WebRender for Firefox)

<comment><USER20> I've been using WebRender on beta builds on Linux for several months already - it works quite well (AMD / radeonsi).

WebRender is more raw indeed, but regular layers acceleration should surely be re-evaluated instead sweeping blacklisting like it happens now.

<comment><USER31> Always remember the YEINU principle: [https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/01/02/yeinu- your-e...](https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/01/02/yeinu-your- experience-is-not-universal/)

<comment><USER20> I'm not the only one who is using layers with acceleration just fine though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > One idea is to flip GL_VENDOR to some random string if chromium is running.

What? Don't do this - _never_ do this. Regardless of whether or not you agree with Chromium's decision, it is _their decision to make_ as the project maintainers; trying to trick the software with falsified data is overstepping your bounds, and both corrodes trust in your driver and leads to whitelists.

I thought we had moved past the days of fake user-agents.

<comment><USER17> The problem is that the Nouveau (and Ubuntu) devs have no way to overturn Googles decision in _Chrome_. Ubuntu can compile Chromium with a modified blacklist but Google distributes Chrome in a deb. You would need some special logic to catch the Chrome .desktop on install and add in the unblacklist flag.

<comment><USER33> They could add "--ignore-gpu-blacklist" to their .desktop entry for Chrome.

<comment><USER17> Ubuntu doesn't have a .desktop entry for Chrome. It comes with the deb. Desktop files are installed by the programs that use them, hence why I said you need to catch the Chrome install and modify the desktop file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> >We can also just take this, as yet-another nail in the nouveau coffin.

I don't understand the dramatics. Nouveau is great but being blacklisted on Chromium is not the biggest issue for it right now imo. A lot of Linux users (myself included) use Firefox anyways, and it's still a default in many operating systems. And you can of course override this. I would place lack of reclocking support much higher than this in terms of issues. And of course, the bugs that caused Chromium to decide to blacklist Nouveau in the first place are still going to affect other accelerated applications.

I'm a big fan of Nouveau, it is what I use on my laptop when in Linux. At the very least, it performs more than adequate for running a compositing desktop environment, and for many common configurations I've had few issues booting things up, the few issues I have had generally solved by using a newer kernel.

If we really want Nouveau to succeed though, the support needs to start coming from Nvidia. AMD and Intel both have in the past supported open source drivers to an extent and it really shows. Nvidia's contributions have been pretty piss poor, and unfortunately it seems they just don't care, which is sad.

I guess I do understand the frustration, but given the fact that this is in response to Ubuntu shipping Nouveau as a default, I think Nouveau's death is a bit overstated.

<comment><USER35> Its weird to work on a project to support hardware when the manufacturer actively tries to thwart you with signed firmware. We need more efforts going into open hardware imho

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Nouveau is the joke.

It _still_ doesn't work with Pascal cards, which are 3 years old now. Not to mention newer Turing cards. It's only good for some obsolete hardware more than two generations ago. The first thing I have to do before installing fresh Ubuntu or Fedora is looking up how to blacklist nouveau, as the system won't even boot otherwise.

It's time to deprecate it for good everywhere.

<comment><USER23> No, it is NVIDIA who is joke, Nouveau doesn't support these cards just because of NVIDIA policy and management. And they are the only who deserve the blame in this case, not Nouveau or Google.

<comment><USER36> AMD has their own set of quirks, they are not open sourcing their main driver either. Nouveau was always a stopgap measure, to boot the system and make it somewhat usable until you install the official binary driver; so is amdgpu. Even if you are open source enthusiast who wants nothing but FOSS on your system (and this is a very minor use case), these drivers do no better than your integrated Intel graphics, which is integrated into CPU directly since time immemorial.

Nouveau and amdgpu were always barely working, just enough to get something on the screen — no state of the art 3D acceleration, no CUDA/OpenCL. But there is a big difference between "barely working" and "black screen on boot, always".

<comment><USER37> amdgpu is not a stopgap driver. It's mature and reliable enough driver to play videogames including a lot of windows games via proton. I don't see a single reason to use a proprietary OS or driver anymore.

<comment><USER21> As long as you don't have a funky setup, sure, but I've never been able to get AMD cards properly working for what I wanted to do (dual GPU setup, AMF on Linux, and multi-virtual monitors, ie 2 simultanious display on 1 monitor, or even getting the proper resolution from monitor behind an hdmi demux) , both with the opensource `amdgpu` _AND_ the proprietary Linux drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This sucks. Chromium doesn't do accelerated video decode for intel on linux either. And now this. What's the AMD scene like ?

<comment><USER39> The amdgpu drivers in Linux are fantastic these days. Works out of the box with most hardware. No proprietary binaries needed, other than the firmware blobs. AMD is doing a really solid job of supporting their Linux user base.

<comment><USER40> Nvidia also does an excellent job of supporting linux. It's just not open source.

<comment><USER41> I don't know, I upgraded to 18.10 and my XPS's brightness control doesn't work. The Prime switchy thing can't change cards without a reboot, and if the screen goes to sleep between switching cards and rebooting, it never comes up again. Actually, with 18.10, it never comes up again anyway. I have a whole host of issues with nVidia cards, my next card is going to be AMD.

<comment><USER42> 18.10 isn't even supported by Dell.

<comment><USER41> Awesome, a laptop with one-year OS support...

<comment><USER43> Dell doesn't support non LTS (long term support) releases. The next LTS release of Ubuntu is 20.04.

<comment><USER41> What does this mean? What sort of support did I get from Dell for 18.04? I had to download and install everything myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> (off-topic rant)

As a Linux user for over 15 years, this is one of the main reasons I am replacing Linux on my next machine, probably with Windows (sigh). Maybe it's just me getting old, but I'm done screwing around with computers to get them to do what they are supposed to do. It's frustrating and embarrassing.

It's not just that some drivers or hardware have obvious problems. It's virtually impossible to get a system where all of the components have vendor- supported open-source drivers, or, when they exist, that a distro supports them out of the box. Many components' drivers only officially support two operating systems. If they don't support your operating system (Linux), then when you have a problem, you're SOL. It's like buying a car that when the transmission blows, you need to hire a mechanical engineer to reverse-engineer it. Better start taking the bus to work, because this could take a while.

Some laptops (about 9 product lines from 3 vendors) make official Linux distro releases available. So you're stuck with a small selection of machines and basically only one distro. Even if that is ok with you, the drivers still won't all be vendor-supported open-source. And on top of that, Linux may have wacky, constantly changing ways of handling the hardware, like hybrid GPU support, or low power mode for Intel wifi chips. Your machine will always be an awkward stepchild.

A limited hardware selection isn't good. Laptops are hard to design. There are _always_ design and procurement tradeoffs, and the less tradeoffs they make, the more expensive it gets. So to get a good experience on a good machine, you need to buy the most expensive one. At that point you might as well buy a Mac.

Finally, there's actual user experience. I've used several distros and environments the past few years, and they all had pitiful user experiences on my laptops. CPU scaling on battery/AC doesn't work out of the box, most of my media keys don't work, hybrid GPU takes a computer science degree to get working properly (with the right combination of drivers and software), echoing the wrong value to a /sys/ entry that had no kernel documentation permanently fixed the cpu fan at top speed, and the latest vanilla kernels with an old kernel config simply won't boot.

I know this isn't everyone's experience, but the only reason I'd recommend a Linux desktop is if they were looking for a complicated new hobby.

<comment><USER8> > The only reason I'd recommend a Linux desktop is if they were looking for a > complicated new hobby.

Not sure if this was just a typo and you meant "laptop", but I imagine most of the problems you're describing could be avoided on a self-built desktop, because you can choose all the hardware for compatibility.

I haven't used Linux seriously in years, but this is how I'm able to make Hackintosh work without constant fiddling, which all logic dictates should be more difficult than Linux.

<comment><USER44> I meant desktop in the software sense. Mini-tower hardware is probably easier to support, but I want to use one laptop for everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Buy an AMD or Intel GPU. They're cost-effective (or non-negotiably bundled, sometimes), they're well supported, and the vendors make a considerable effort to ensure that stable, compliant drivers are available on every major operating system, and that the free ones are no less stable nor any less compliant.

AMD's performance is competitive dollar-for-dollar, and the top of their lineup is about 80% as good the absolute highest-tier competitor most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER46> As a Linux user, I am happy about this change because Nouveau is just not an acceptable driver.

I hope that this puts pressure on both Nvidia and Ubuntu to have a better default.

<comment><USER47> Agreed. It's very easy to install the proprietary driver in Ubuntu and in my experience it Just Works™. Why not default to that? The vast majority of Ubuntu users aren't open source evangelists who'd choose to use an inferior driver purely for ideological reasons.

</comment></comment><comment> pablo-massa Slightly unrelated but can anyone speculate on the reasons why Nvidia doesn't open source its drivers? I'm curious.

<comment><USER48> My understanding is _a lot_ of stuff in Nvidia drivers isn't _technically_ owned by them. As in they license out A company to make Y thing with Z license. After 20+ years of legacy those weird licenses add up, and no-one feels comfortable with releasing the code. Whether or not that's true? Hard to say... For comparison AMD has been (since 2015) working hard to make nearly all parts of their drivers upstream in some fashion (amdgpu). While that's not a 1:1 comparison there (AMD has less capital than Nvidia) it shows it _is_ possible to free these drivers.

<comment><USER49> The real answer is that releasing source code means uncovering (some of) their cards. The company, that relies on selling identical hardware under vastly different prices, won't ever do that. Using game-specific speed-hacks to "fix" games, purposefully written to violate standards, is another issue. Especially, when those games were made with help of Nvidia engineers. Why give up such ability?

I also suspect, that they make use of multiple patented technologies, both in hardware and software. When Java has been re-licensed to GPL, one of the most prominent pain points, that caused endless whining on part of OpenJDK users, happened to be it's font renderer. And we all know, that font smoothing is tricky business, and all font-smoothing tech in existence is patended by MS/Apple/Adobe. When you start replacing closed-source code with free replacement, those patented pieces tend to quickly come up — especially when open-source projects go to great length to work around patent issues instead of shoving them under the carpet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is another reason why we shouldn't let current web browsers decide the future of the web... which to them will become a proprietary black box of slow JavaScript spyware and horrid markup languages.

<comment><USER51> > which to them will become a proprietary black box of slow JavaScript spyware > and horrid markup languages

Did you read the bug report?

<comment><USER50> I didn't see anything about a black box, except that users had reported issues and they didn't feel that they could investigate them because there were to many variances in Linux distros.

<comment><USER51> There are screenshots of the issue in the report. They've also said that there is a pattern of Nouveau instability that you don't see in proprietary drivers. Its all in the bug report.

<comment><USER50> The screenshot was from Ubuntu. I haven't experienced the issue on Arch at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> If we are speaking about the fairness. We should blacklist everything. All available GPUs and its drivers whether its official or not on every OSes, cannot be trusted in its current state.

</comment><comment><USER53> For my part, I am blacklisting Chromium and NVidia.

</comment><comment><USER54> What is nouveau

<comment><USER55> Open source driver for nvidia graphics cards it looks like

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_\(software\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> What is nouveau?

<comment><USER57> A reverse-engineered driver for Nvidia GPUs on Linux that is open source. Since it is reverse engineered, it tends to be buggy. Most Linux distributions use this driver by default, since it is open source.

There is an arguably superior driver supplied by Nvidia. It is faster, has better hardware support, and is arguably more stable (1). However, it ships as a closed source binary blob with a source-based shim layer to integrate it into the kernel.

(1)My wife has 2 Linux desktops with Nvidia GPUS. She ran nouveau by default. However, on both machines, it would cause a kernel oops, and lock the screen up. My wife assumed it was her entire machine locking up, but I realized from the stack traces that were recorded that it was the GPU driver. I then switched the machines to the Nvidia driver, and they have been stable ever since.

I personally always buy hardware from Nvidia, because they provide a binary driver for FreeBSD. They are one of the few companies in the non-server space to provide good packaged drivers for FreeBSD.

<comment><USER58> > ...it would cause a kernel oops, and lock the screen up. My wife assumed it > was her entire machine locking up...

Thank you! I think you might have just solved an issue for me that happens intermittently with my linux mint 18.3. At least we'll see once i dive into output of stack traces, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> #year-of-the-linux-desktop

On a more serious note what is the motivation for Nouveau? The drivers provided by Nvidia are not good enough or we just need an opensource alternative?

<comment><USER60> We have Thinkpad Linux laptops running with NVidia at work. The proprietary driver has quality issues, the biggest of which for us is power management and poor battery life. Nouveau performs much better in this regard, even though they had to reverse engineer the hardware (!) I will be advising my IT department not to continue to buy NVidia.

<comment><USER61> I have a Dell XPS with an Nvidia 1050, running Fedora 29.

The Nouveau driver was so bad here that I blacklisted all the drivers and just use the Intel GPU. It's the difference between 3 hours or 6 hours of battery.

It apparently ran the Nvidia power on even when no program wanted to use it.

<comment><USER38> >It apparently ran the Nvidia power on even when no program wanted to use it.

Are you sure you didn't install nvidia drivers? That is a common symptom with nvidia binary drivers. Nouveau on the other hand is fine with powering the device off when not used. For nvidia drivers, the bbswitch method is more reliable, but is apparently deprecated by distros these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Meh, I typically use Chrome through a virtual machine with Spice which has broken OpenGL support, so I wasn't getting hardware acceleration anyway. I still get screen tearing in Firefox, for Christ's sake.

<comment><USER63> There is an easy fix for this: Set layers.acceleration.force-enabled: true in about:config.

I believe this is because Firefox assumes it's the responsibility of the compositor you are running to properly vsync, but if you're not running a compositor you can turn on this option.

<comment><USER62> Thank you for the tip. I still seem to get screen tearing with this option enabled, however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Will this make Firefox the best browser on Linux by default then?

Also, as mentionned in the bug thread, if nouveau is actually stable on Newer versions, similar to User Agents, the newer nouveau versions could change their name to bypass the blacklisting. No need to pretend to be NVIDIA, just something different that nouveau, like 'nuevo' or something.

<comment><USER65> Can't they also use GL_VENDOR / GL_RENDERER and parse version numbers out of it?

<comment><USER66> Chromium said they'd do that if someone tested which Nouveau versions work fine and provided a test suite to use. Ilia Mirkin (in the link) said he tried to run their test suite but got errors on the latest Nouveau (possibly due to a browser issue). So as it stands now Chromium doesn't know which if any versions of Nouveau are stable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Browsers should not need to have GPU acceleration anyway if they are just browsers. But instead, as is Chrome's/ium's style, it wants to be an OS instead of a browser. All other browsers are trying to follow suite but that still doesn't make it right. The more hardware functionality exposed the less secure a browser is.

</comment><comment><USER68>
        From: Drew DeVault <firstname.lastname@example.com>
        To: firstname.lastname@example.com
        Subject: nouveau blacklisted in Chromium

        I'm writing to complain regarding the decision to blacklist nouveau in
        Chromium. You're creating a hostile relationship with one of the most
        important projects on Linux. If you do anything about this problem, you
        should be using your influence to pressure Nvidia into being a better
        citizen on Linux. Hell, you could even sponsor the nouveau developers
        for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of Google's
        budget. Instead of doing any of the right things, you chose to become a
        bad actor on Linux.

        Closing bug reports from nouveau users and directing them to the
        freedesktop bug tracker? Fine, you don't need to fix someone else's
        bugs. Blacklisting the driver? Not even remotely okay.

        I strongly condemn your decision and I expect it to be rolled back as
        soon as possible.

        --
        Drew DeVault

<comment><USER65> > _It 's not the browser's place to have any code whatsoever which even so > much as glances at the graphics vendor to make meaningful decisions._

I'm curious why you hold this position. I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs, right? It's okay for a user to override their user-agent string, and fine for browsers to mention other browsers for compatibility, but uncool for a browser to not identify itself at all and steal another browser's user- agent string.

The OpenGL API includes vendor strings for a reason. Chrome isn't doing `strings` on the library or anything.

<comment><USER68> Note: I edited my comment to simply be a copy of the email I sent to the devs. You quoted the original text.

>I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering.

So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience _in the domains for which they are responsible_.

>It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs

This is also a very dumb anti-practice.

<comment><USER65> They don't blacklist Windows because it spies on users, but they _absolutely_ blacklist anything from AV to malware because it causes instability. [https://blog.chromium.org/2017/11/reducing-chrome-crashes- ca...](https://blog.chromium.org/2017/11/reducing-chrome-crashes-caused-by- third.html) This seems like exactly the same thing. They're responsible for delivering a browser that renders webpages successfully. They're doing what needs to be done to make this happen.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tepco carries out examination in Fukushima by remote-controlled probe - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/02/13/national/tepco-completes-physical-examination-probe-melted-reactor-fuel/ <comment><USER2> How fascinating that they might need to develop new tools for the unique circumstances. Does anyone know if they would keep the design proprietary and e.g. mine it for profits, or are they under any requirement for open-design, open process?

It strikes me that in what can be described as a "disaster" from many angles, they are potentially modeling a working containment-and-recovery process from other angles. This could be extremely valuable, the exception to the safety tradition that writes new rules providing higher leverage in working with beneficial and yet hazardous materials.

<comment><USER3> It's been quite a few years and this is the first time they've made to reactor.

My guess is this success is not so much a matter of finally creating a clever design as it is the radiation has finally gotten down to a manageable level. I know they tried earlier with quite a variety of robots, all of which were rendered useless by the radiation levels (sensors and circuits becoming too unpredictable).

<comment><USER4> What are the radiation levels the failed robots experienced? Searching, I keep finding information about radiation levels in reference to human health. But I'm interested in the total dose those robots get before they fail. I used to work on space electronics that had to survive mega-rad levels of total dose radiation. How quickly do electronics accumulate those levels inside Fukushima?

<comment><USER5> Maybe I sound naive, but why do we need to move electronics there?.

Why they don't just use a disposable lead tube ending in the minimum working telescopic lens (mechanical) system possible and a cable moving electrons inside to build an image in a computer at km of distance. The brain of the robot should be out of the building, not inside.

Couldn't we estimate radiation by how long some well known matherial is surviving before to crash instead to use a sensor?.

<comment><USER6> Ah, the HN "why don't they just"...

A good overview: [https://www.wired.com/story/fukushima-robot- cleanup/](https://www.wired.com/story/fukushima-robot-cleanup/) containing the excellent phrase "Until we send the bot in, we don't know what the conditions are. And after it's sent, we can't change it".

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/robots-fukushima- nu...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/robots-fukushima-nuclear- disaster-dying-probe-clean-up-tepco-toshiba-reactor-nuclear- radiation-a7612396.html) : "The latest attempt to harvest data on Fukushima failed after a robot designed by Toshiba to withstand high radiation levels died five times faster than expected.

The robot was supposed to be able to cope with 73 sieverts of radiation, but the radiation level inside the reactor was recently recorded at 530 sieverts per hour."

<comment><USER7> If anybody is curious how much radiation a sievert is, there is a handy chart for reference:

[https://xkcd.com/radiation/](https://xkcd.com/radiation/)

530 sieverts/hour would mean a person exposed for less than a minute would be a dead man walking. Even a 30 second exposure would be difficult to recover from. Electronics would suffer from constant bit flips.

You would really need to keep most or all of the electronics back in a shielded box at the end of a long cable and make the robot as dumb as possible. This sadly only goes so far since you do need sensors that are made out of electronics on the robot. Cameras for example. It's a complicated system, and worse you need this robot to be quite capable if it's going to deal with uneven terrain and eventually breaking up and removing the melted fuel.

<comment><USER5> > a person exposed for less than a minute would be a dead man walking.

Yup, fortunately robots aren't alive

We know how to fabricate telezooms to take a photo to an animal at 400m distance. We use periscopes rutinely that do not need electronic necesarily. We know how to take a photo to the reflection in a mirror and zoom it later. We have the technology to make a mirror with a very finely polished metal surface (would be that sensible to radioactivity?), and we have all the time in the world to make a big photo secuentially from many small simple photos, ommatidium like. with less info encoded ...

Why we need electrons when we could use photons and an optic cable to translate the info at 100 km in some fractions of second? What happens with an optic cable when radioactivity hits it?

<comment><USER8> Optical materials of all kinds are vulnerable to darkening, clouding, and embrittlement by much lower levels of ionizing radiation than those in the reactor [1]. Darkening along the length of an optical fiber adds up quick, and will quickly render it opaque. Shielding won't help you at these radiation levels; you would need inches of lead cladding [2], and even then your fiber optics might not have a useful lifespan, exposed to at least tens of Sv/h along much of the length. And shielding offers nearly zero protection against neutron radiation.

Also note that the radiation in the reactor can heat the internal elements of your perisccope by hundreds of degrees, so without a cooling system your optical system's tolerances are at risk. Remember to make everything waterproof, and robust against shock and vibration.

After you figure all that out, you still need to get your periscope into the reactor somehow. Humans can't go closer than about a kilometer, and any robot you use must be able to navigate industrial wreckage.

These are not simple problems.

1 - [http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a013786.pdf](http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a013786.pdf)

2 - [https://www.eichrom.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/gamma- ray...](https://www.eichrom.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/gamma-ray- attenuation-white-paper-by-d.m.-rev-4.pdf)

<comment><USER6> "Virtually unusable after lengths of as little as 10m", wow. I'd no idea they were that vulnerable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know why it was raining inside the reactor?

</comment><comment><USER10> seems that there is more progress on Mars than at Fukushima. That illustrates the true scale of risks/dangers/difficulty of dealing with nuclear disasters. Basically we have no technology to deal with nuclear disasters. All we can is just to wait for the radiation to decrease while for example in Belarus several thousand people die per year from Chernobyl related cancers (plus associated birth defects, etc.). And we can do nothing. This is why the only way we have is like Germany - getting rid of nuclear completely. While nuclear is our best bet in space, on Moon/Mars/etc., it just cant be used on Earth as we completely lack necessary technology.

<comment><USER11> That is a lie.

According to the WHO ([https://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/20110423_FA...](https://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/20110423_FAQs_Chernobyl.pdf)), a "large fraction" of 6000 thyroid cancer cases (to 2005), of which 15 were fatal, are attributable to radiation exposure. No other health impacts are supported by evidence.

As such, the actual figure for deaths (at present, over 30 years since the incident) resulting from the Chernobyl incident is somewhere between zero and one per year.

Even if it was thousands of deaths per year (which it is not), that would still be far below the number of deaths caused by burning coal.

<comment><USER10> >As such, the actual figure for deaths (at present, over 30 years since the incident) resulting from the Chernobyl incident is somewhere between zero and one per year.

and that can't be farther from the Belarus reality. For example [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16506213](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16506213)

" In addition, a significant 2-fold increase in risk was observed, during the period 1997-2001, in the most contaminated districts (average cumulative dose of 40.0 mSv or more) compared with the least contaminated districts"

Breast cancer in general is the most frequent one - 1 in 8 women will get it over lifetime. Now double that. That is the reality of life in Gomel and Mogilev regions which took the brunt of the Chernobyl accident.

Russia and Ukraine have the same cancer rates, while Belarus - same people, same habits/lifestyle/etc. - have 1.5x cancer rates of Russia/Ukraine resulting in about 15000/year extra cases and the majority of those extra cases are in the Gomel and Mogilev regions. The cancer mortality in Belarus is 30%-50%. Do the math.

>According to the WHO ([https://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/20110423_FA...](https://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/20110423_FA...)), a "large fraction" of 6000 thyroid cancer cases (to 2005), of which 15 were fatal, are attributable to radiation exposure. No other health impacts are supported by evidence.

that is a lie. The minimally honest WHO report would at least added something like this:

"There is a significant increase in cancer rates in the most contaminated districts. WHO sees no evidence connecting it to the contamination. Correlation is no causation. Pure random distribution. What are the chances!"</comment></comment></comment>


The Case Against Google - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5895010

<comment><USER2> "imagine you woke up tomorrow and there was no google". So you mean there would be no analytics (something gizmodo probably uses), no gmail, no google docs, no code.google.com and on top of it I would have to use Bing! That seems like apocalypse to me.

Having a single privacy policy is not that bad. Surely, we need to be wary of google overreaching, but the world is still better off with google than without it.

<comment><USER3> Try it. You might be surprised just how long you can go without needing their services.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: how can WiFi captive portal web pages affect iOS hardware keyboards? - <AUTHOR> There are many reports [1] of this unsolved issue: external iOS keyboard (bluetooth or smart connector) works until authentication to some WiFi captive portals.<p>Theoretically speaking, how is this possible? Could a wifi access point send incorrect management frames that affect the hardware chip that handles both WiFi and Bluetooth on iDevices? Why would that affect non-bluetooth keyboards that are physically attached via Smart Connector?<p>[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8075772 <comment><USER2> 2.4 GHz WiFi can interfere with Bluetooth transmissions since they use the same frequencies. It's particularly bad when the two transceivers are located close together or share the same antenna.

There is a bag of tricks for dealing with this such as separating transmissions in time, cancelling out the transmitted waveform that bounces back to the receiver (really works, enables full-duplex communication,) etc.

Certain devices might not play well with coexistence mechanisms and thus cause problems.</comment>


Will Large Screen iPad Pro Be Apple's First In A Line Of Desktop Touch Devices? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/12/29/will-the-large-screen-ipad-pro-be-apples-first-in-a-line-of-desktop-touch-devices/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is a VERY SMART move by Apple. If this iPad Pro becomes the reality then it sure puts a stiffer competition to Google's Chromebooks (including Pixel with touchscreen). I don't consider Microsoft as their Windows PC market share has been plummeting rapidly. Amazon reported this week that "two out of its three best selling laptops during the holiday season were Chromebooks." Google's track record with hardware has not been stellar whereas Apple is surely a leader in this space. I say "bring it on" Apple. I am in favor of competition as it certainly helps consumers in the end.</comment>


Pine64 - <AUTHOR> https://www.pine64.org/ <comment><USER2> This seems super awesome and useful, under the assumption they ship. I have not tried anything else on the site, but put my name down on the waiting list for a pinebook around 6 months ago, and have yet to hear anything...</comment>


Show HN: UserExperienceReview.com Let's talk about design - <AUTHOR> http://www.userexperiencereview.com/ Show HN:

    SUMMARY: A web app for public design criticism through a simple annotation and voting system overlaid on user submitted comps or interface screenshots.

    Here's an example:   http://www.userexperiencereview.com/reviews/google/interfaces/search

  A good user experience is something that emerges from the totality of decisions made during the design process- from early product decisions through to the textures and flourishes of the graphic design.  Yet so often UX discussion focuses on the minutia- should the label go on the left of the field, or above- and not the whole picture.  Important questions, all, but without context, what is intended to delight and engage becomes dry and stuffy.

  UserExperienceReivew.com seeks to become the place for discussion around the successes and failures of actual design in the wild.  What github did for developers, and dribble for illustrators and designers, UX Review hopes to do for UX and design professionals and enthusiasts.  Post your own designs to ask for criticism, discuss the latest redesign of influential sites, comb through a number of examples of a design pattern to see what worked and what didn't.  UX Review hopes to compile a huge design reference, with accompanying high quality crit.

  The site is a side project of mine- my wife:terriloewenthal.com helped design the splash page and a few other elements, but otherwise its just a one man show.  Lots of inspiration from the product design of github, dribbble, imgur, documentclowd, stackoverflow.  Please use the hell out of ux review.  And don't hold back on the criticism.

  - Jason Libsch
 <comment><USER2> I'd likely use this if it were a module on my sites, like the G+ support tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, that's a good idea! One possible use for the ux review is something along the lines of uservoice or getsatisfaction for design/ux I will log that one... thanks!</comment></comment>


How The World Spends Its Time Online (GIF Image, 950x1700 pixels) - <AUTHOR> http://www.visualeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/timespentonline.gif

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is the "daily internet activities" description a bit confused. Do 18% of all adult Americans really deal with their online bank "every day"? Or did they perhaps mean that the average user does it a couple of times per week?

<comment><USER3> I think it means that 18%, but a different 18%, access their bank online every day. This means that everyone has, on average, accessed their bank roughly every five days, or just over once a week.

<comment><USER4> That seems reasonable. I have accounts at several different banks and I access at least one account per week, if not more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm actually quite surprised that Amazon is not among the top ten most popular brands.

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems strange that Microsoft is in the top 10. They've separated out MSN/Bing, so doesn't that just leave the corporate site and MSDN?

</comment><comment><USER7> The world is not just the USA, but interesting graph anyway.

</comment><comment><USER8> 2,646 sites per month visited. What? That's 88.2 per day! Did they get this figure by including RSS aggregation?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to know if the RescueTime guys can confirm or dispute this info. It would make a nice counterpoint.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's interesting there is that 25% of internet users don't use search engines.

<comment><USER11> More likely is that they do use a search engine, but don't realize it.

For example, new browsers with search bar functionality etc.

<comment><USER12> What is a browser? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ>

<comment><USER11> That's frightening.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Machine Learning is influencing the customer journey - <AUTHOR> https://monkeylearn.com/blog/machine-learning-on-the-customer-journey/ <comment><USER2> Hi, the author here.

Would really like to learn other cases of how sales are changing with the advent of machine learning.

If you have any questions or critiques I would love to hear them.</comment>


MySQL Alternatives to MySQL - <AUTHOR> http://techportal.ibuildings.com/2012/03/15/mysql-alternatives-to-mysql/

<comment><USER2> Here's a cached version: <http://www.postgresql.org/>

<comment><USER3> asking seriously, are there any downsides to using postgresql?

<comment><USER4> The out-of-the-box configuration for Postgres has a lot of performance issues compared to MySQL. I'm not really sure _what_ scenario it's designed for, but I've always needed to make changes for my use case.

Postgres' query optimizer is a _lot_ smarter than MySQL's. For trivial queries this is irrelevant, but your queries have to get a lot more complicated before they'll confuse Postgres relative to MySQL.

Postgres doesn't (that I know of) have multiple storage engines. You don't get something like MyISAM where you can trade transactional safety for better read performance. This is both a plus and a minus: you only have one option but _all_ of the storage engine-related developer time has gone into fixing up that one option.

If you're experienced with MySQL, Postgres will probably come off as ... pedantic. Historically it as a project has cared a lot more about data integrity than MySQL has. That means a lot of the things you could "get away with" in MySQL aren't allowed. In general this is a good thing, but it also can get irritating.

In general, Postgres seems to expect you to know/care a lot more about databases. MySQL is set up so that many use cases work well enough without tuning it, but the flipside of that situation is that the average community member probably doesn't know as much about configuring it to get better performance.

If you're looking to treat your database as a big heap that stores your data and more or less efficiently regurgitates it (i.e. 90% of web programming's use of databases) then Postgres is likely going to need too much babying for the value it provides. If you _actually_ need to deal with very complex queries and can afford to care deeply about your data, I'd have a hard time recommending anything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've personally used Percona/XtraDB quite a bit - if you are used to MySQL it is pretty much a drop-in replacement (i.e. you won't need to rewrite any queries). One nice feature is the ability to do hot backups without locking tables, using their XtraBackup:

<http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtrabackup/>

<comment><USER6> TechZing recently had a really great interview with Baron Scwartz from Percona. A really interesting interview, highly recommended:

[http://techzinglive.com/page/975/172-tz-interview-baron- schw...](http://techzinglive.com/page/975/172-tz-interview-baron-schwartz- cutting-edge-mysql)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Error establishing a database connection". Better find an alternative quick :).

<comment><USER8> oh the irony

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Article loaded fine for me.

It's a pretty good overview of the differences between percona, mariadb and drizzle, with more on what the focus of each project is, as well as the pros and cons. Probably nothing many of you didn't know at some level, but nicely collected in one spot without any major prejudicial comments.

<comment><USER10> That's funny. I just assumed that it was an attempt at a joke since it gave a DB connection error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just my experience, but there are a whole bunch of optimizations one can make to "official" recent MySQL versions before having to switch platforms, even to mostly compatible ones as mentioned in the post. Yes, Oracle ownership can be a reason to switch, but if you don't want to, don't just assume the thing can't scale til you hit the point of "more hassle than it's worth". Premature optimization and all that.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article fails to mention the licensing problems that caused issues with MySQL, only that it was "a change in ownership". PostgreSQL has they kind of license you want to go with ... a large part of it's historical and future strength(s).

To summarize: Don't use non-permissively-licensed database software, otherwise you're screwing yourself down the road.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Error establishing a database connection" Bad advertizing joke this one.

</comment><comment><USER14> Have anyone tried drizzle? It looks like its developers are trying to bring some of the postgres goals to MySQL codebase. I wonder if anyone has seriously used the software?

</comment><comment><USER15> devNullDB

</comment><comment><USER16> NoDB</comment>


Nginx 1.3.0 is out - <AUTHOR> http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES#1.3.0

<comment><USER3> It's important to note that this is a development release, something that's not immediately apparent from the linked page. This does not replace or obsolete 1.2.0 that came out last month and it is not intended for production use. Rather, it's the first release of the new development branch that parallels 1.2.0 and will hopefully see WebSocket support added as a feature soon.

</comment><comment><USER4> Running Ubuntu 11.04 with nginx 0.8.4 how do I upgrade to stable (1.2.0) without screwing my whole setup (multiple sites + varnish + php-fpm + memcache)?

<comment><USER5> Easily, just copy configure arguments (nginx -V) from installed version of nginx and run ./configure with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Question: Is there any advantage to using nginx over apache if you are not hosting a huge traffic website that uses lots of long polling etc?

<comment><USER7> It depends is the only honest answer.

However, personally I find it uses less memory, which if nothing else frees up space for other processes

<comment><USER6> Phrased another way, if Apache's performance is adequate are there any non- performance advantages to nginx?

<comment><USER5> No.

<comment><USER8> Well, I'd argue that configuration is nicer with nginx than with apache if you're running something other than php.

But the trade off there is nginx only has centralized config whereas you can do .htaccess stuff with apache, so meh.

<comment><USER9> True. But if you already have your Apache configs complete then it might not be worth switching at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I still see no SPDY, looks like it's still planned though.

<comment><USER11> nginx 1.3.0 isn't actually out, and they weren't actually targeting 1.3.0 for SPDY support according to this: <http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/roadmap>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And still no websockets. Makes me sad inside :(

<comment><USER13> It's planned for 1.3.x: <http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/milestone/1.3>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looking forward to a day when I can give Nginx another try when its feature set has matured in more directions. Its unfortunate lack of fine-grained versatility in some areas of configuration forced us to stick with Apache's httpd after trying to replace an old Apache setup with Nginx - <USER2> looked much better in terms of resource efficiency, until we hit the problem of simply not being able to translate a few specific configuration scenarios from Apache to Nginx, forcing us to deem Nginx as a definite no-go for our case.

<comment><USER14> Did I hit a nerve of some zealous Nginx user when mentioning the fact that Nginx isn't a silver bullet? :) I'm sure you can downvote this comment, too! Knock yourself out!

<comment><USER15> No you just gave a handwave "Nginx is not all that" without supporting the assertion. You would get the same response posting "Nginx is the greatest thing since sliced bread and you should ditch httpd."

<comment><USER14> I wasn't aware that this was a Q&A or issues tracker for Nginx, which is why I never had the intent of bringing details up. My apologies for posting these things in the official Nginx resources. The sarcasm is on the house.

<comment><USER16> (You're still [dead]. Look at HN from a non-logged-in computer.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Wikipedia layer has been removed from Google Maps - <AUTHOR> http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/toaewYdz0kg <comment><USER2> Google doesn't get "it" anymore. People used their products because they were free and provided tons more functionality over the "other" competition (mapquest/yahoo/askjeeves).

If they aren't providing the features that differentiates their services anymore, people will leave them. Just because Google's stuff is free doesn't mean I have to put up with their constant anti-user focus. In fact, that Google products are mostly free makes it that much easier for me to pack up and leave.

Fuck off Google.

<comment><USER3> This over a map layer? The quality, breadth and accessibility of the data Google maps provides is the reason I keep using it. What else is there? Apple Maps?

<comment><USER4> Yes. Or MapQuest.

Hey, this is the internet. We all switched from AltaVista to Google and from MapQuest to Google Maps, and from Yahoo mail to Gmail. If Google sucks, vote with your feet.

It's really no harder than changing a bookmark.

<comment><USER5> When changing mail providers (I chose Fastmail) I made sure to pick a service that would let me use my own domain. I now "own" my email address, so in the future switching will be even easier. I suggest others do the same.

<comment><USER6> This is great for the few like us that enjoy having a personal domain, but most people don't which is very unfortunate. It's very-painful for most people to migrate email providers.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if there's a business opportunity there: make it easy to own a personal domain name and use it with various other services. So instead of having to monkey with MX records for mail, you just say "I'm using provider X and here is my account info.". If distributed social networks ever go anywhere (a dubious proposition, I'll admit) then automatic configuration/hosting could be bundled, with all the necessary configuration and DNS records done for the user.

Of course this magical company could go bust, but even if it did, the users would technically be able to migrate to one or more other providers without losing anything, including URLs.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that the popular free providers don't offer domain hosting, and the paid ones that do (e.g., Google Apps, FastMail) already handle that for you, if you let them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been playing around with a wikipedia layer on Google Maps - [http://retred.org](http://retred.org) \- code here: [https://github.com/twistedvisions/anaximander](https://github.com/twistedvisions/anaximander). It's just a couple weekends play at the moment, but the cool thing about it is the date slider at the top - you can see what was going on in a certain area at a certain time.

It's a bit shit at the moment (and only has 10% of dbpedia's births, deaths, city foundations and battles at the moment - things with both a time and a place) , but have a play and try not to break my AWS micro instance!

<comment><USER9> V interesting. I've been looking at this too. There were a few deficiencies in the google implementation that bugged me. (1) You have to click on icons to read the info, I think the wikipedia layer should be browsable and ideally include photos. (2) No way to filter to certain articles (e.g. WWII battles) and (3) No date filter - as you've spotted. Tweet me @mbrenig if you want to talk more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used the Wikipedia layer extensively during a road trip around Scotland. It was a great way to find nearby places of interest - I daresay the trip wouldn't have been anywhere as interesting without it. More recently I was in France, hoping to do the same thing. To say I was disappointed to find the feature had been removed is a massive understatement.

I don't really understand how Google gets away with this sort of thing, I thought it was Software 101 to never remove features. It's _sort-of_ understandable if the feature has very few users, but it sounds like this one is used by quite a lot of people.

<comment><USER11> Well, that Software 101 thing applies to software you sell to customers. The theory is that you should keep doing the thing that people pay you money for.

However, with Google, we aren't the customers, we're the product. So here the equivalent question is, "Does the Wikipedia layer help the advertisers make sales?"

<comment><USER12> Does Google losing users help advertisers make sales?

<comment><USER11> It could well. For example, getting rid of the Wikipedia layer might make people more likely to click on displayed ads. So the people who leave Google because of the change might have clicked many fewer ads than will now be clicked by those people now more focused on the important thing. That is, giving Google money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At Google's scale, there will always be some people using that niche feature, but that does not mean that it is a good fit for the product.

<comment><USER14> Yes. But when you used to have a company culture that looked favourably on niche features, and you later start to remove niche feature after niche feature after niche feature, that you start make a lot of people a little disappointed in you.

In other words:

Lets say you remove 100 "niche features".

You have 100,000 users.

Every niche features was used by 0.05% of your users.

Now you have upset 100000 * 0.0005 * 100 = 5000 or 5% of what is likely among your most vocal users.

<comment><USER15> This assumes the set of upset users for each feature is disjoint. Not sure it makes a difference to your larger point, but I have a feeling that there would be overlap.

<comment><USER11> Niche features tend to be disjoint, in that they're mainly defined by use case and audience. If a bunch of little things are used by one audience, that is often treated as just one feature, even when they would be considered separate features if they were for different audiences. If something is used across audiences, the feature generally isn't thought of as niche.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems pretty arbitrary. I'm sure there was a business case discussed, but between this, Reader being discontinued, and the new mega-application in Android for OS updates, I sometimes wonder what direction Google is heading in the near future. 2006-2011ish seemed like such a great era of Google-led innovation (my dates are probably off or rose-colored -- your call).

<comment><USER17> Why does there need to be a business case?

Its quite probable the engineer that built the layer has left (either Google altogether, or just to another team).

As its aged its started misbehaving, and nobody left is interested enough to figure how to fix it. Ultimately its easier just to ditch it than to maintain.

euthanasia rather than murder.

<comment><USER16> Sounds like a good case to ensure documenting of codebase is expected. Is bitrot a normal thing in firms such that somewhat large projects are abandoned because of poorly documented code?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Luckily OsmAnd+ (cost £5, there's a free version) is brilliant, and having all of the maps loaded into the phone at once is so much better than having to download bits of maps as you go along. It navigated me around Japan faultlessly last January.

<comment><USER19> Almost all Osm apps on Android I've tried freeze completely when you zoom out to more than 1/4 Tokyo level. Is this any better ?

Edit: just downloaded the full version, and I can confirm it's a lot better than every other Osm apps I've tried. I'm using a Galaxy S4 by the way

<comment><USER20> I just tried to see if this bug exists in OsmAnd+ but couldn't reproduce it. In general, it is a tight and stable app. Give it a try. There is a free version which is as good as the paid one.

Edit - here is their git repository: [https://code.google.com/p/osmand/](https://code.google.com/p/osmand/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You know, Google really did a great job with the gmail UI. Truly it's awesome.

But I'm starting to think it was a fluke, because holy fuck, browsing their "forums" is so painful.

<comment><USER22> Interesting.

Could you please tell me what you like about it? I have very mixed feelings leaning towards unpleasantness (where the hell is CC and why does it take more than one click?).

<comment><USER21> What I like about google forums? Almost nothing.

I don't know what CC is.

edit: OH, I get it

I like Gmail because of the threaded view. It's old hat nowadays but the fact remains that the threaded view is quite simply leagues better than old-school email inbox views.

I'm not saying it can't be improved, but it's a very good ux. I even like the new compose, once I got used to it.

As for CC... why do you need it? Just add the address to the "To:" field. The result is the same. The only time you need to put it in a different field is for BCCs, and quite frankly I imagine most don't use that feature.

<comment><USER23> Pine has had conversation threading since 2002. Mutt has had conversation threading since at least 2003.

I'm just saying, the original Gmail UI guys were inspired by _good_ email clients. :)

<comment><USER21> You mean Pine, the hideous ncurses client that stopped being developed in 2005?

<comment><USER24> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I giess this will really make devs understand that one day, they might see a world without google or any search engine, and they will start to adapt and create a more decentralized internet.

I'm not talking about a come back to the stone age, but I'm sure there are tons of opportunities to do networking with decentralized apps so that users can actually own their data to make it more relevant. Today the internet is completely ruled by big companies, and users can't really decide how the internet should view them.

</comment><comment><USER26> The new Maps is an utter failure end to end, IMO. It's much slower than the previous version (both the web and android app), it takes ages to load; the various tools (traffic, etc) are much less practical and easy to use; on the mobile version, it can't cache large areas anymore (complete PITA), and anyway there isn't any way to manage the cache; and the guidance on the android version doesn't work at all anymore, it systematically displays the map on a wrong orientation and gives ridiculous indications; the last couple of times it sent me on the wrong way repeatedly to a point I simply stopped using it at all.

Furthermore I failed to see any significant improvement from the rewrite. Only annoyances.

<comment><USER27> Don't forget the missing zoom buttons that make it almost impossible to use the app with one hand only...

<comment><USER28> Double-tap to zoom in.

Double-tap + drag up to zoom in, double-tap + drag down to zoom out.

Both of these have been in maps for a while, and are a lot better for one- handed use than those Android 1.5-era buttons ever were.

<comment><USER29> How the heck is the average user supposed to figure that out? Not intuitive at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This can only be good news for wikmapia. [http://wikimapia.org/](http://wikimapia.org/)

At one point wikimapia was the most popular map built upon the Google Maps API. I'm pretty sure it's why Google introduced a wiki layer themselves to Google Maps.

</comment><comment><USER31> Has anyone else started getting huge performance issues with Google Maps recently? The new big update is super laggy for me, so I switched it back to the classic mode. However, that mode keeps freezing up or loads really slowly. The funny thing is it only happens on Chrome.

<comment><USER32> I just built a new computer. Haswell 4770k, 16 gigs of ram, geforce 760. Google maps desktop performs so bad that I actually use bing maps instead now. I can't believe how slow it is.

<comment><USER33> What OS are you running?

I've found that Linux machines which run OS's with older kernel versions (CentOS 6.4) seem to have unbearably bad performance - just speculating but I think it's probably due to a lack of hardware acceleration support in the video card drivers. The new Maps uses vector-based instead of tile-based rendering which requires quite a bit more computational power to achieve a nicer look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Another annoying removal is the distance ruler from Labs. I used that thing all the time.

<comment><USER35> I still have it, at least on my laptop where I use classic maps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I noticed the WP layer missing (on the public web maps) quite a long time ago. Very disappointing. (I heard there was a disagreement between WP and Google that may have precipitated that.) Along with that, I believe that the amount of information detail on Google's (public web) maps has been dropping steadily. I've assumed that's because of increased mobile usage necessitating bandwidth-trimming measures. (No hard examples, based on expectations created by prior experience.)

Similar things seem to have been happening at OpenStreetMap ... the gradual fade of a certain kinds of detail. Zoom in on a region and see what kind of luck you have identifying bodies of water. (Same problem at Google.) I've had to switch to the MapQuest version for that.

<comment><USER37> Can you give more detail on what you are missing in the osm map and link to examples? That style is open, unlike.the others.

<comment><USER36> Well, for example compare:

OSM [http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.3825/-68.5375](http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.3825/-68.5375) (I don't see anything on the St. Lawrence River either...)

Mapquest [http://mapq.st/18F1XnO](http://mapq.st/18F1XnO)

Looking at LARGE bodies of water away from populated regions, I'm seeing very few labels anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you're looking for a replacement, I really love the Roadtrippers tool: [http://roadtrippers.com](http://roadtrippers.com)

It's not a Wikipedia layer, but their data sets are interesting. There's a lot more context than the Wikipedia layer because they've organized things into categories. Their international coverage isn't as good as their US coverage, though.

</comment><comment><USER39> Oh look another feature I never used getting dropped but there will tons of outrage over.

<comment><USER40> I felt the same way when reader was discontinued. "Meh, I never used it and don't see the big deal." Then google got rid of Latitude, which I used extensively, and I finally knew what it felt like. Google will arbitrarily drop something you like and you too will understand the outrage.

<comment><USER39> I get it, Im expecting them to drop google voice any day now and I'm going to be pissed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> WHY? "I think you will not get an answer to that question"

I didn't even know about this layer, but this has tipped the scale for me.

After reader disappearing, trying to change Maps in a way I don't like, pushing G+ everywhere and merging separate products, all the NSA lies, and changing GMail compose, I look forward to supporting non-Google efforts. /rant</comment>


Depression Part Two - <AUTHOR> http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-part-two.html

<comment><USER2> I can't praise these two entries on the matter enough (here's the first one - [http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures- in-...](http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in- depression.html)). They've allowed me to better explain to those on the outside what it truly feels like. She does an amazing job with her illustrations and her words, and I wish her all the best in her recovery.

</comment><comment><USER3> The lack of feeling, motivation, and the disconnect are well illustrated.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For some background, Hyperbole and a Half started out as a comic more light hearted, but then the author went through some depression. This is her first post in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is so amazing and relevant. Nail. Head.</comment>


A short critique of Stallmanism - <AUTHOR> http://jancorazza.com/2016/09/24/a-short-critique-of-stallmanism/ <comment><USER2> > Note, in advance, that I am not saying these should not be free, they > absolutely should, this is a problem on the level of the philosophical > framework and of strategy -- not a factual mistake on the value level

It seems like this critique rests on one central premise: Stallman is too ideologically pure. He's a zealot. And this is true, no doubt.

But I do wonder, hasn't every successful movement been spearheaded by a zealot, by someone who refuses to compromise? The work of outreach generally falls on these people's followers.

Jesus, Ayn Rand, Lenin, etc...

<comment><USER3> > Stallman is too ideologically pure

No, Stallman is not ideologically pure _enough_! He's very principled, however he simply has some mistaken principles.

I define ideological purity not by the level of zealotry, which Stallman certainly doesn't lack, but by the level of consistency with a wider social analysis and general correctness (now the relativists will get me but this is possible to define by linking principles and conclusions, I just don't want to get into that).

And in this respect, Ayn Rand is pure, Lenin fucking invented it, and so on.</comment></comment>