I was going through some old mails in my account and I realized that I bought my ATI HD4850 over a year ago, and it hit me: In this year I've never had decent support for my card in Linux. Neither the proprietary driver nor the OSS one managed to provide even a tiny fraction of the features I enjoyed when I was an NVIDIA user (or an Intel user).
What drove me to buy an ATI card was the news that they were going to publish the specifications and I thought that maybe for once a manufacturer understood how to interact with the community and that they were actually going to make some positive change in the Linux driver scene. Right then, I earned an appearance on the cover of "Incredibly Naive People" magazine.
After reading a couple of blog posts about how developers and users felt betrayed by the treatment Apple is giving them I realized I was in a similar position: I have a very good piece of hardware, but the company that makes it couldn't care less about me. I belong to a minority of people who actually enjoys having a choice in the matter of operating systems, and that makes me a LOUSY customer.
After this horrible year, I now understand the reasons for ATI/AMD's decision: they can't (won't) support Linux so they'll handle the responsibility to the community. Let them carry the weight of developing and maintaining the drivers. I'm not judging the company's morals on this, it IS a corporation after all, and they can do whatever the hell they want with they're products and their drivers.
NVIDIA won't be releasing their specifications anytime soon, but...guess what? It seems they actually give a crap about Linux users! Back when I was an NVIDIA customer, the longest time I went without support from their drivers was just a month (with the release of Fedora 8 or 9). On top of this, we now have Nouveau, that might not be in good shape yet, but if I was to switch to NVIDIA right now, I would have basically the same features I "enjoy" from the AMD/ATI hydra of drivers (catalyst, ati, radeonhd, etc.).
So, this is me saying "Adios AMD", I won't get suckered again into your bullshit anytime soon.
What drove me to buy an ATI card was the news that they were going to publish the specifications and I thought that maybe for once a manufacturer understood how to interact with the community and that they were actually going to make some positive change in the Linux driver scene. Right then, I earned an appearance on the cover of "Incredibly Naive People" magazine.
After reading a couple of blog posts about how developers and users felt betrayed by the treatment Apple is giving them I realized I was in a similar position: I have a very good piece of hardware, but the company that makes it couldn't care less about me. I belong to a minority of people who actually enjoys having a choice in the matter of operating systems, and that makes me a LOUSY customer.
After this horrible year, I now understand the reasons for ATI/AMD's decision: they can't (won't) support Linux so they'll handle the responsibility to the community. Let them carry the weight of developing and maintaining the drivers. I'm not judging the company's morals on this, it IS a corporation after all, and they can do whatever the hell they want with they're products and their drivers.
NVIDIA won't be releasing their specifications anytime soon, but...guess what? It seems they actually give a crap about Linux users! Back when I was an NVIDIA customer, the longest time I went without support from their drivers was just a month (with the release of Fedora 8 or 9). On top of this, we now have Nouveau, that might not be in good shape yet, but if I was to switch to NVIDIA right now, I would have basically the same features I "enjoy" from the AMD/ATI hydra of drivers (catalyst, ati, radeonhd, etc.).
So, this is me saying "Adios AMD", I won't get suckered again into your bullshit anytime soon.
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