[Wylug-discuss] Laptops again

[Paul Brook]

> I'd agree with you about current Intel HD Graphics, but not about
> proprietary driver pain.  I don't know what distro you're on, but the pain
> on Fedora / CentOS is decidedly minimal (to the extent I'd struggle to
> call it pain), and the general quality of their driver and OpenGL
> implementation easily covers it.

That hasn't been my personal experience at all.  Out of three machines (over a 
couple of hardware generations) with a nVidia card only one was ever stable 
under the proprietary drivers.  The other two required unplanned rebots at 
least once a week.

Updates for new kernels/Xorg only arrive after upstream has made releases.  If 
you're running Ubuntu or Fedora (or I guess CentOS which has very slow update 
cycles) you might be lucky and not hit this.  If you're running anything else 
there's a good chance your distro will push out an upgrade before nVidia does.

IIRC they still don't support xrandr, so you have to use the shonky nvidia app 
rather than the standard display controls.

On top of all this, support for older hardware is somewhat sketchy.  There are 
"Legacy" drivers, but they're subject to ever less maintanance than the 
regular ones.

Given this is a request explicitly asking about good linux support it seems 
reasonable to recommend vendors that support their open source drivers (Intel, 
ATI) over a company that actively avoids them (nVidia).

While I can't claim to be unbiased on this subject (IMO binary kernel modules 
are just plain wrong), I think it's faily clear that open source drivers are 
always going to provide better out the box workingness and generally less 
hassle to keep alive medium/long term than proprietary ones.

I'll admit that the nVidia proprietary drivers seem to be the best of a bad 
bunch, but that's not saying a lot.

Paul