ATI and the driver debate

[Tainted_Girl]

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Personally I think it's kind of stupid for ATi not to provide open source display drivers for Linux.

[Dapper Dan]

ATI makes great cards. It's a shame they don't support Linux in the same way Nvidia does. Not all my boxes need 3D graphics, but when they do, I use Nvidia for the support.

[zba78]

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Personally I think it's kind of stupid for ATi not to provide open source display drivers for Linux.

You're welcome to your opinion of course, but I don’t necessarily think it’s inherently stupid, so long as the proprietary drivers they do produce are good.

As an owner of both ATI and Nvidia cards I can say the Nvidia certainly provide better support. Having said that I’ve not had any problems getting the ATI drivers to work with different distributions.

[fingal]

I use an ATI card on my current desktop box, and I recently broke the driver by updating some Xorg files (don't ask me which ones - I decided that it would be a good idea to do this). I've tried to fix things, but realised that if I'm having trouble it's not my fault. If you Google for ways to modprobe your ATI drivers into your kernel you'll quickly find that things have moved on a bit! Support is there (which is great) but inconsistant in some cases.

And compiling from source? Well ... I use Mandriva, and the ATI driver requires kernel headers to do that. Trouble is I don't like editing my Make files so that they can find their way to the correct (bespoke Mandriva) directories, only to then discover that it still can't find them all! It's a time sink.

Good job I don't play 3D games anymore! I've decided that when I do upgrade I'll be switching to NVidia for purely practical reasons: i.e. to save time. I'm sure that if I went to a lot of trouble I'd get the card using decent fps again, but I don't want to spend my weekend doing that.

[zba78]

.....Support for Linux is important, for me more important than releasing specs/open source driver.

I agree totally. For me hardware vendors supporting Linux for now is more important then hardware vendors supporting the Linux philosophy (i.e. open-source).

[carlosponti]

whats silly is that for those are upset at companies for not releasing the drivers under open source only want those to be there for 3d support and mainly because they are wanting to play games some of which are not open source either. so they are upset that the drivers are not open but the games can not be open. anyways you dont need 3d really to get around so why bother installing the drivers if all you need is 2d. then you dont have to worry about the drivers being open source.