Comment 37 for bug 614088

Revision history for this message
Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl) wrote : Re: [Bug 614088] Re: unity should give an error to the user when not supported by the driver/graphic card

On 13/10/10 01:02, teledyn wrote:
> this is insane -- an interface for lo-res lo-resources machines and it
> is PREDICATED on 3D co-processor support?? That is beyond foolish. Ok,
> add me to the growing list of people to be bitten by this, and now has
> two machines upgraded but now rendered largely useless because they
> cannot run Nautilus and now can no longer run Netbook.

Teledyn, the previous UNR depended on 3D as well. This version exercises
more of the 3D driver, however, so if your drivers have support for the
bits used by the old interface, and not also the bits used by the new
interface, then it will feel unusable.

We do ask the drivers if they support the necessary capabilities, and
fall back to an older Gnome-2 style interface if they don't. However,
sometimes drivers don't report their capabilities accurately, or they
have bugs. This was the first release of Unity, it gives us a chance to
identify the problematic hardware or drivers and blacklist them so they
get a simpler, 2D interface instead, or work with the driver vendors to
fix them.

There are certainly bugs in Unity, but I would urge you to try it on
hardware which has the necessary driver support to judge the actual
interface direction itself.

Mark