On the removal of the posts on Envy…

First of all thanks for all your kind comments. I am putting the posts back.

After all Envy was born for the Community and its existence wouldn’t make sense without its users, who provide feedback and contribute to make Envy an easy alternative to reading long howtos (which I write as well) and to long (and inevitable) troubleshooting sessions if something goes wrong (as regards the said guides). All the time I spent helping users on Ubuntuforums.org made me realise how important it is to have a quick way to install the latest release of (ATI or NVIDIA) proprietary drivers (e.g. what happens if your new card is supported only by the latest driver which is not available in the official repositories?). There is a massive request for such tools and when I read that some users got to know Envy on Planet Ubuntu and saved their computer from reinstalling Ubuntu (or even XP), I think it’s better to put back the posts on Envy. Of course you’re free not to use Envy and to read howtos (on this subject), which is perfectly fine and you’ll become more knowledgeable.

Even if such posts might look like spam (or simply useless) to the (lucky) users of graphic cards which work with (3D enabled) open source drivers, very often do they solve problems to many users (and, at least as far as I can see on ubuntuforums, most users seem to have ATI or NVIDIA cards).

P.S. Don’t worry, if you have a look at my website you’ll see that there are well visible warnings against using non-official tools in Ubuntu. Furthermore Envy has its own page on Launchpad if you want to report bugs.

19 thoughts on “On the removal of the posts on Envy…

  1. Well, I just wanted to say: Keep up the good work. The Linux community need dedicated persons like you. I have been in Nvidia/Vesa-hell a few times myself so i appreciate the effort you make. People can say whatever they like about proprietary drivers, but if the choice is XP/Linux(Nvidia blob) the choice for me is easy.

  2. I am curious as to why you develop Envy at all. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the work anyone in the developer community puts in towards making life easier, but why not just work within the Ubuntu development community and work on getting the latest Nvidia binary driver packaged in l-r-m and put in the repositories?

  3. @Evan
    I proposed such a thing some times ago:
    https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/uptodate-ati-nvidia-driver

    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UpToDateAtiNvidiaDrivers

    My spec wasn’t taken into consideration…

    I set up my own repositories but, having no support from Ubuntu, I decided to shut down the project since it was way too time consuming. For example I should have rebuilt the packages for all the supported systems (for both 32 and 64bit systems) every time I found out a security update was released.

    Furthermore there are some cases in which even the drivers from the repositories fail. Nothing that can’t be fixed though.

    If Ubuntu’s devs are interested I can give them a hand. For example I gave the solution to this bugreport:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20/+bug/98641

  4. There are posts on Ubuntu Planet about a large number of subjects, of which I’m only interested in a few. That’s fine!
    The only thing that bothered me about Envy (don’t take this the wrong way) was that I have never have seen explained what Envy actually is in one of those posts.

    Maybe one single post a long time ago at ubuntu planet explained what envy meant and what kind of tool it was, but all the other posts where written for an audience that knows what to think when seeing the word “envy”. That didn’t include me (until it bothered me so much I googled for it)

  5. @Floris
    pretty much every post on Envy has a link which you can follow. If you click on the link you will see also an explanation of what Envy is.

  6. Thanks for putting the posts back. I dont use Envy, but I like reading about them (just like I use KDE all the time, but read both planet gnome and planet kde).

  7. Thanks for your work with Envy!

    It makes my life so much easier and without your envy program i must go back to vista because no tutorial work for my new HP notebook only you envy program with manual install make it possible for me to use UBUNTU !!!

    god bless you

  8. Thank you so much for writing this application! I am new to Linux and have been having the toughest time getting things to work. When I found your link, I downloaded your app and had my nvidia drivers installed within minutes! You are awesome!!! 🙂

  9. Hi,

    Thanks a lot for your great job on Envy! It’s rather better than the native support of nvidia drivers by Feisty…

    Will Envy be included in Gutsy?

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