ubuntu-gaming team mailing list archive

[Arc Riley <arcriley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

ATI did produce some pretty horrendous proprietary drivers for Linux, and
many people incorrectly carry that over to today.

AMD purchased them and much has changed.  All the driver specs have been
released and, along with Redhat and Novell, there's good support for almost
all of their chipsets now.  They even released specs for their latest
chipset line, re-affirming their commitment to doing so.

The free drivers produced from this have been going through evolutionary
leaps every few months, we're seeing all sorts of shader support added to
the older chipsets.  I've not found a single Radeon card recently that
wasn't supported, even a client's crappy old IGP Radeon in a laptop I
recently worked on worked great with Compiz and the games I tried it with.

While it's great that Ubuntu supports people with nVidia cards, there should
really be a more unified "Don't buy nVidia" message being delivered to
Ubuntu users.  Their drivers need to be updated for every kernel version, if
they don't update them in time any Ubuntu release could be left having to
use an older kernel or loose support for nVidia users, not to mention the
ethical issues of deppending on proprietary software for such a core OS
function as graphic support.

Relying on nVidia's continued support for Ubuntu is neither sustainable nor
in the spirit of Ubuntu.