Biondo wrote:I don't know which Nvidia card you had or how old it was, but my experience is the opposite of yours. Talking about graphic cards, ATI and Intel have always had bad Linux support, Nvidia excellent.
I would totally agree that ATI had a very bad Linux support some years back, but that changed with AMD (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_four_r300&num=1). The fglrx driver works quite well for most cards today and even the free radeon driver is kinda mature and supports 3D acceleration for a bunch of cards.
For nvidia you have the nouveau and the nvidia. Both have given me terrible pain everytime i came across them (on far more than one chip). Nvidia has so far been absolutely hostily regarding free drivers while AMD has a totally different mindset (or strategy) which might enable us to use free drivers for most of the video cards in some future. For Nvidia it (as of now) will be binaries or reverse engineered drivers.
Anyway i totally disagree concerning Intel. They re one of the few companies who are actually involved in the developement of free drivers and that´s why there is no proprietary driver at all. The only Intel chip that really lacks support is the gma500 and that one has actually not been developed by Intel and so they have some legal problems to release the specs and create free drivers.