Re: Laptop Recommendations?

On 2/23/07, John M Flinchbaugh <john@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It's interesting to see so many people railing against ATI cards and
preferring Nvidia these days. I guess it depends upon your concerns.

For years now, I've always bought ATI to get usable 3D performance and
support out of the box on my Debian machines. I just use the open DRI
drivers distributed with the kernel and Xorg.

I've avoided Nvidia to avoid the displeasure of trying to get kernel
support from the lists, and they won't talk to you until you reproduce
your problem without the proprietary drivers loaded. I also don't like
to sit around waiting for 3rd-party drivers to come out.

I've come to understand that I'll not get compiz or beryl (flashy 3d
desktop environments) to work anytime soon on my ATI card, and I must
admit that I don't push my machine performance with many games.

Have circumstances in the Nvidia/ATI worlds changed?
--
John M Flinchbaugh
john@xxxxxxxxxx


Hi John,

ATI has stopped providing decent proprietary/closed source video
drivers for their video cards under GNU/Linux or at least that's what
I hear. This has angered many GNU/Linux users and prompted them to
switch to Nvidia (since they have much better closed source drivers).
I would hope that stunts like this would wake up more folks in the
community to the fact that we desperately need open source video
drivers. I really dislike the proprietary drivers: Everytime their
is a kernel upgrade I find myself reinstalling video drivers :/ I
think I liked things better when everyone was trying to reverse
engineer video cards to run in GNU/Linux. The support was much
better. Their is a petition to ATI floating around,
www.petitiononline.com/atipet/ about their lack of support to the
community. A lot of people ask the folks who are IT savvy (quite
often GNU/Linux users of some sort) which card to get for their *doze*
box. I hear NVIDIA much more often than ATI these days simply because
of their drivers. I don't believe that companies will ever provide
software or support that is as good as a user based dev community can.

When I was shopping for a new laptop recently I met quite a few folks
who kept right on moving when they saw ATI inside even if the price
was good. I would ask them why and the answer was usually I am
installing Linux. Intel claims they are going to go completely open
source with their drivers (which would be great) but I haven't seen it
yet.

Best Regards,
Manaen


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Relevant Pages

  • RE: Radeon 9550 video playback problems
    ... Have you updated the drivers for the DVB-T USB 2.0 device, see link, is this ... The video playback problems within Windows Media Player 10 have disappeared. ... ATI built by is always the better choice than the powered ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: PCIE video cards and DRI
    ... >Nvidia and ATI closed source drivers when used with PCI-Express ... I have set up a number of Linux boxes with Nvidia and ATI ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: Need help with ATI Radeon 9600XT All in Wonder...The WDM driver disapear from "Sound, Video
    ... Use this utility to remove all ATI stuff from your computer: ... Install the latest video card drivers from here: ... > ATI WDM Rage Theater Audio ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: [opensuse] Preferred Video Chip
    ... I have never specifically installed a Video Binary ... You just add the nVidia or ATI repositories and install the video ... binary drivers because the vendors do not release the source code, ...
    (SuSE)
  • Re: Advice on a new system please
    ... Quiet components ... Looks like all the bits on that have Linux drivers. ... I don't have a strong preference between ATI and nVidia; ... Although ATI ...
    (uk.comp.homebuilt)