Suggestions on notebook

[jonathan at jonmasters.org (Jon Masters)]

On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 07:10:53PM -0500, Matthew Nicholson wrote:

> Ward Vandewege wrote:
> >On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 06:02:54PM -0500, James Kramer wrote:

> >>   Also, It has the option a selecting either an ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M or
> >>   NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400. I was thinking about selecting the ATI. 

> > Be very careful with ATI - their linux support is essentially 
> > non-existant. I think you'll find NVIDIA driver support far
> > superior. ATI sucks, frankly.

> I second this. i've had little to no issues with nvidia.

I like this, because you're both openly extolling the virtues of
horribly proprietary video drivers as if there's no problem :-)

> any ATI's i've delt with have given some sort of problem.

I had only ever bought ATI cards until recently (specifically avoiding
nvidia because of their proprietary binary only drivers for Linux). In
fact back in the 90s I called up ATI's CEO's office (transatlantic calls
used to actually cost something here) to thank them for helping out the
GATOS guys with their All In Wonder support.

Those were the days of co-operation. In today's world, ATI have to look
after the bottom line and that means X-Box, which in turn means that
various docs seem to be less forthcoming lately. But those are the
breaks of big business. Nvidia aren't any better.

As a result, it's difficult now to know who to go with. I do know that
the Ubuntu guys (and others) are more likely to recommend Intel graphics
(so was claimed at the FOSDEM last week) because support is apparently
more forthcoming than elsewhere. I admit that I do now own exactly one
device with an Nvidia graphics chipset, but I'm running the open source
driver, which can at least be supported on some level by the community.

My point is, next time you get one of these cards or a laptop with a
graphics chipset in it for which you think there is super supoort, check
that it's not in the form of a closed source binary only driver and that
the vendor is actually working to get support into upstream Linux.

If you still don't think I have a point, try telling the Linux kernel
community about any problems you have with a closed source binary only
driver and see how far that gets you. It's impossible for the community
to help you when you use one of these things.

:-)

Jon.