Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Neon_Cowboy
Not to mention in that market share % this isn't "one OS" where are talking about either there are many distributions they are quite different. There is no ones take all. Though we have all herds of the big players there are hundreds of deferent distributions (well over 400) some being general so being purpose specific. I'm sure these different distributions many are based off other but these changes. Could mean trouble and massive challenges in way of providing driver support. I'd like to see one distribution raise to power among the Linux crowd and it get all the Linux support. As windows has in the desktop world.
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Obviously it's not a huge obstacle, as Nvidia has been doing this for a long time.
Their linux driver works on pretty much all common Xservers, and with pretty much any distro. on distributions where it doesn't install, it's typically a few lines of a text file to modify that the end-user can do (doesn't require nvidia), and nvidia typically includes those modifications in their next release.
I know this:
Radeon 9000 , 9600, and 9500 desktop cards, and 9000 and 9600 mobility radeons, are what i initlaly used with Linux systems.
All 3 desktop cards have been removed.
1 of the systems (my personal desktop) is using a TI-4400 geforce 4, another is using a 440mx geforce 4, and the third is using Intel 810 integrated graphics.
Well actually until about a month ago, where we moved the 440mx to the intel system, and put a 6600gt into the workstation.
My notebooks, however, can't be modified so that is where I still use the ati linux drivers.
But back to my point:
We have used the following Linux distros:
Suse 8.2 -> 9.1 -> 9.3 -> 10.0
Redhat Enterprise 3
Fedora Core 4
(and FreeBSD 5.3 but that's not relevant).
With Ati, we've had various installation issues with Control Panel application not working, mtrr issues, system hardlocks, failure to suspend (well suspend is ok, just doesn't resume). Installation issues are very vague in that sometimes the Suse specific RPM's work, sometimes they don't. The ati-installer seems to work ok but then we have to clean up some of the SuSE fglrx files manually (not the case anymore with suse 10 though).
With Nvidia, never really had any problems (except with swsusp2, but swsusp works fine). Never had installation issues. Just download and run.
In terms of performance, FAR superior with Nvidia.
Also in terms of card support, had an issue initially with the radeon mobility 9600 but that was corrected rather quickly. With nvidia, never had a problem.
The purpose of this post isn't to say "go to Nvidia". Rather it's to say "Ati can't do that because.....". The above has indeed been done by Ati's competition, so for the argument to be "ati can't do it", or "it's nearly impossible to do", Nvidia has definately done it.
I personally prefer Ati hardware (per my initial recommendations at work for the radeon carsds). However, their offerings with limited support and slow development make it -impossible- for me to switch from their products to nvidias for our linux systems.
Long story short, the switching cost is very low, and the perceived value is much higher when switching to Nvidia.
Ati used to feed the opensource drivers, but lately, they've tried to pump up their proprietary binary ones. The downside is, they've left their linux customers hanging.
With slowing (and restricted/limited) development on Opensource drivers for new cards, and very slow development on their binary drivers (12 releases a year is meaningless if they only address 1 small issue/bug per release). The time spent having to package and test the drivers for each month could instead be spent on drvier development.
To me this 12-releases a year thing is a bad idea (unless they have the ample resources for it, whcih Obviously they do not).
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