[clug] ATI drivers and Ubuntu/linux in general

[David Tulloh]

Hal Ashburner wrote:
>
> Out of interest, what would $distro_of_choice have in their kernel 
> that linus & co. upstream would reject? I'm sure there are good 
> reasons for running distro kernels rather than kernel.org kernels, but 
> what are they?

The big reason is testing.  The kernel no longer has a stable/unstable 
branch, they just have a development branch (with sub-branches).  So 
when the kernel is released it has bugs in it, which are fixed in the 
next version but that has new features and they have bugs too etc.

The distributions grab a version and stick to it.  They backport bug 
fixes from the later kernel versions into their kernel version but 
ignore the new features.  So you end up with a stable, well tested and 
less buggy kernel.


David