On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Heinz Sporn wrote:
The reason why so many people literally hate Ati when it comes to Linux is rather simple: their Linux driver support is - simply put - weak, on the edge of not existing whereas Nvidia was rather friendly to the community right from the start.
"From the start" is a bit exaggerated. But they had binary drivers much earlier than ati. On the other hand for the r2xx and earlier chips there are xorg native driver (i.e. "open source") and r3xx/4xx drivers are being worked on (w/o any documentation unfortunately, i.e. rev.eng.). While nvidia is fiercely anti open source, even with their chipsets (nforce) drivers. This may suit some people (most?) as long as they don't think of the consequences. These (can) include: instability, no support for newer kernels, if there is a bug it is up to nvidia to fix them - if they consider it worth the effort, for the tin-foil-hat people; drm, spyware, security-in-general etc... Personally, open source drivers are important because of stability, support for my hardware even when the manufacturer thinks it obsolete, support for all the new cool features in the open source world without special hacks, standards compliance etc.
Best regards
Peter K -- [email protected] mailing list
