How do we get NVidia to make nvidia-settings a less terrible piece of software?

Ever since I've been asking this question, the predominant answer has been something to the effect of "well one day we'll have free drivers so we can just ignore the problem"

But, in the meantime, NVidia-settings has been so awful it's been scaring users away from Ubuntu for the past 4 years. If you have multiple monitors, or want to change resolution, NVidia-settings gives a horrible experience. On multiple occasions I've seen it, singlehandedly, convince a user that Linux was "not ready".

Most of the stuff in there doesn't even make sense -- for instance there's a completely useless "write to xorg.conf" button that is incredibly scary.

So what can we do?

Solution 1:

The nvidia-settings tool is open-source (GPLv2 + BSD), so it's entirely possible for anyone to make it better. I'm not sure how easily patches would be accepted by nVidia, but at worst you could fork it.

The other option is to write a different front-end, disper from this answer takes that approach.

Both of these options are constrained by the interface exposed by the binary blob, so there'll be a limit to how much you can implement. The blob's interface is reasonably good, though, so you could make a lot of progress without needing any explicit support from nVidia.

Solution 2:

Check out Disper and Disper-applet. Disper is a CLI front-end to the nVidia driver (so you can change the monitor configuration from the command line), and Disper-applet is a very simple gnome-panel-applet that allows you to change the monitor configuration on the fly.

There is a .deb for installing disper, but not for disper-applet I'm afraid -- if you need help, post a question on the Launchpad-page.

Link: https://launchpad.net/disper

All the best N

Solution 3:

Well the Catalyst control centre is not a terrific piece of software either. So ATI/AMD is as much to blame. The problem lies with the perception that linux users are not heavy gamers, so do not need advanced tools for tweaking their graphics experience. We can start by writing a front-end to nvidia-settings to tweak hidden settings. I am not exactly sure whether that is possible,but like many users i favour the "Do it yourself approach".

Solution 4:

The answer to this question is the answer to bug #1. The moment the community is large enough to show these companies that linux is a platform worth giving some attention to, is the moment they will suddenly give us high quality software. Everyone who has ever done development on both windows and linux knows that Linux is in all honesty more straight forward to develop on in modern systems (many will claim otherwise for various reasons, but we know if we weighed the differences linux would win).

If we can make linux appear also to be a market, as opposed to just a free for all anything goes community, you will see an influx of high quality software even faster. That would happen because first game/3D application/math application developers who target ATI/nVidia would be indirectly putting pressure on them to provide a good experience for linux customers (as well as regular users equally), and with the bottom line falling from under them, the big two would scramble to make a better experience.

I hope my little rambling/rant makes sense =), but in my opinion this is the solution we seek after.