A very poor choice

Ubuntu 10.04 isn’t out yet. But will be soon. In it, there are some good things, some nice things. And an insanely poor choice. They are effectively preventing users with NVidia cards from using NVidia’s drivers. You have to go through some absolutely insane hoops to be able to use NVidia’s drivers. The Nouveau driver is incomplete, isn’t up to the performance on 3D graphics, nor the stability of the NVidia drivers. Putting it on as the default for users with NVidia cards is, IMO, a terrible mistake. Moreover, we, as end users, have very little freedom to make this choice, as to which drivers to use, at installation time. As of now, we have had 2 different nvidia based machines, with different motherboards, and different graphics cards completely fail to install the updated NVidia drivers, because you can’t un-install Nouveau, you can’t disentangle the very poor choices made by Ubuntu. So if its a choice between hardware that works fine in older Ubuntu and newer other distributions, and a distribution which causes us (and likely many others from what I can see) immense grief, guess which one is going to give? Really … guess … its not hard. The folks making choices behind Ubuntu made some really poor choices with this distribution as of late. Very poor choices indeed.