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Comment by jakubw | Hacker News Reader

Presenting this screen before you can actually get the OS does not make much sense for new users. They won't know if "hardware support on more PCs" or "performance optimisations" will be any important for them. It'd be more sensible for this to show up as a built-in screen after you've used Ubuntu for a few months.

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It'd be most sensible to show up at multiple, carefully selected points in time.

For example all Xbox Live Arcade games are required to have a trial (demo) which can be seamlessly upgraded to the full version at anytime. Every trial is required to award the player an Xbox Live achievement and Xbox Live Avatar Item at some point. When receiving either a pop-up occurs saying "You've earned <X>, unlock the full game now to keep it". Or something to that effect. Then of course there is a final upsell at the end of the trial.

I think it would be a much better idea to have people give in the beginning, but instead of asking them where the money should go, tell them that their name will be included in the next release as a contributor on their site and in an "About Ubuntu" dialog in the desktop version and /etc/contributors on the server version where it lists the various levels of contributors and their names. This would encourage more businesses to give.

"Paying before you can actually get the OS does not make much sense for new users."

It does make sense for Windows and OS X users :)

Windows and OSX users aren't asked to itemize their 'contributions' into various buckets.

True, the issue in particular with "hardware support" is that the biggest problems desktop users seem to run into with Ubuntu is video drivers for nvidia/ATI and it doesn't seem like there's much canonical can do about those anyway.

ATI drivers? The open source ATI drivers have progressed wonderfully recently. I never even flirt with the idea of tainting my desktops or laptops with proprietary drivers. The situation is different with nvidia but I am still happy with the machine I have with an old nvidia card I purchased for mining btc.

What problems do people have with the free ATI drivers?

This is from June, here are some benchmarks of the proprietary Catalyst driver vs the open source driver built into ubuntu.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r...

I'd be shocked if they'd made up that huge gap in 3 months.

I have never noticed any performance problems with free ATI drivers. Have you used the free drivers and thought it felt sluggish?

I switched to an nvidia card about a year ago because the free ATI drivers either gave terrible OpenGL performance or some apps didn't work at all because features were missing from the drivers and the proprietary drivers gave me all kinds of horrible glitches.

I only use nvidia cards (with the proprietary drivers) because they were the only ones I could find with decent framerates playing something like Minecraft at 1080p resolution.

Do the free ATI drivers get 60fps (or even 30fps @ 1080p resolution) for most full screen games? If so, could you tell me which model of card you are achieving this with?

They're ok for anything but games (for which I use windows anyway), but the power management sucks. I get 3-4.5h with the free driver and 6-7h with the blob.

While you're correct, I think such a message after installation and use will make it feel a little like nagware(a bit like how Windows prompts you to activate it) even if its a one time.

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