Comment 53 for bug 1

Many pepole on this forum has talked about gaming but one thing that no one has mentioned is the fact that most modern games needs OpenGL to run.

In order to get these Open GL games to run they need drivers from either ATI or Nvidia corporation because that is what most gamers use on there computers. Neither ATI nor nvidia has made there drivers awalible as opensource so they can't be installed by default by ubuntu because ubuntu is 100% free software.

I think this is the biggest issue of all the mentioned issues if the awarige gamer will ever start to use ubuntu as a gaming plattform

Today the drivers for Nvidia are awalible from ubuntu repositories but when installing them you need to hack the /etc/x11/xfree86config. this is not wery user friendly for the awarige user.

I thnk this issue needs to be solved before advertising ubuntu asa gaming plattform because otherwise the users that arewilling totry ubuntu willreturn towinXP thinking that linux is way to hard to learn.

I can think of two posible solutions to solve this issue

1. Convince nvidia and ATI to make there drivers open source so that they can be included in ubuntu

this can be tricky but if enuff peapole starts to mailing them about opensource drivers? who knows.

2. make ubutu less restricted about 100% free software and include the drivers anyway so that things work "out of the box " for gamers.
there are other distros out there who has the nvidia drivers preinstalled xandros, korora xgl, mepis etc