Opinion: NVIDIA drivers are a Good Thing [tm]

[T. Ribbrock]

On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 06:45:42PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
[...]
> Still, better binary-only (buggy, breaking at each kernel upgrade) 
> accelerated drivers instead no accelerated drivers at all.

That's the biggest beaf I have with those drivers: They *are* buggy. I
bought nVidia for three machines in the past for two reasons: a) at the
time, they seemed to be the best choice with regard to Linux support and
b) I could get them cheaply second hand. Out of the three machines (one
being based on an nforce chipset), *one* machine works well, the other
two show frequent freezes and/or crashes - something I never had when I
was still using bog-standard 8MB G200 or ATI Xpert cards (PCI/AGP). The
situation hasn't changed over the last versions, quite the contrary - the
latest versions make even more trouble. Add to that the nuisance of
having to deal with a driver upgrade each time I have to upgrade the
kernel and I can only conclude that nVidia's drivers are a stopgap
measure at best, as there aren't many better things out there. I have
one box with an older ATI Radeon card (don't remember which), which I
still have to play with[0]. So, yes, I currently think we *are* lacking
fast cards with good, reliable support, preferably open-source, as
open-source drivers tend to get maintained better.

Cheerio,

Thomas

[0] it was giving me a headache in one of the boxes that now has an
    nVidia card - couldn't get the snow off the screen, no matter what
    driver. Seems to work better now in the other box, with the XFree
    drivers.
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                Thomas Ribbrock    http://www.ribbrock.org 
  "You have to live on the edge of reality - to make your dreams come true!"