Just to be clear you are taking about binary drivers for desktops/laptops and this news is totally about mobile (Tegra). It is commonly agreed upon knowledge that on PC platform ATI's binary drivers suck compared to Nvidia's.
However in my experience ATI's GPU docs project plus the resources they invested in getting OSS driver to properly support ATI hardware means that normal users shouldn't really need to install binary drivers if they have a recent ATI GPU. And it works good enough for 3D and power management is supported so laptops benefit too.
Nvidia's patches referenced here are for Tegra which is strictly a mobile chip - nothing to do with desktop/laptop. In desktop/laptop department NVidia's OSS support is still non existent and Nouveau doesn't work as well as OSS ATI driver due to lack of documentation.
I only have limited experience with AMD chips: helping friends and family get Ubuntu running on their desktops and laptops. I have been sticking to Nvidia for the past 10 years whenever a Linux box is involved. I have to say that while the AMD/ATI OSS drivers do work, getting them working can be an exercise in the mystical arts.
The most recent issue was getting my brother's HP laptop to run Ubuntu. The OS installed but would not launch the X server. The fact that there are multiple different drivers possible for his card made matters much more confusing and neither the official docs nor the Ubuntu forums provided any ready-made answers past "install package X" which we did. I was able to get it to work but it took hours.
On the other hand the Nvidia binary blobs just work. You install it and start the X server. That's it. They don't seem to be bothered by the kernel upgrades when running Ubuntu either.
As far as I'm concerned, just buy Nvidia. Welcome your binary blob overlords and don't waste time on getting things working. I do of course wish that Nvidia just open sourced their current drivers, but for me usability of the system out of the box is worth much more than having or not having yet another binary blob.
That's odd. What laptop was that? There really shouldn't be any reason for all but newest ATI GPUs to not work out of box.
With nvidia the terrible stability and kernel upgrade hassles plus the need to externally install the drivers means it should be much uglier an experience than out of box ATI OSS drivers. Anyway as long as it works...
Never had any stability issues with nVidia drivers personally. As far as installing, I just use the akmod packages from rpmfusion, they take the binaries and package it up for every kernel. When you pull down a kernel update, you also pull down the associated binary drivers. Open source ATI linux drivers might be less install hassle, the problem is they just don't work for anything beyond the most popular cards running 2D graphics on a single monitor.
>Open source ATI linux drivers might be less install hassle, the problem is they just don't work for anything beyond the most popular cards running 2D graphics on a single monitor.
I have been using nVidia cards on Linux since the GeForce 2. I have never had any problems with their driver (apart from misconfiguration by me before X.org started autodetecting screens/GPUs and xorg.conf etc. was deprecated).
It's a small thing, but their binary drivers do not support kernel modesetting, so if I want to switch between X and the console it takes several seconds with a visible screen blank. Using nouveau (or anything that supports KMS) is very fast by comparison.
I don't personally use the OSS drivers, so their status doesn't weigh in on the buying decision at all for me. My 5870 is meant to drive up to six monitors, something the OSS drivers can't do right now (I have three).
However in my experience ATI's GPU docs project plus the resources they invested in getting OSS driver to properly support ATI hardware means that normal users shouldn't really need to install binary drivers if they have a recent ATI GPU. And it works good enough for 3D and power management is supported so laptops benefit too.
Nvidia's patches referenced here are for Tegra which is strictly a mobile chip - nothing to do with desktop/laptop. In desktop/laptop department NVidia's OSS support is still non existent and Nouveau doesn't work as well as OSS ATI driver due to lack of documentation.