I just bought an nvidia card

[Mazur]

Congratulations! I would like to do it too but unfortunatelly I can't.

[damentz]

Yes but don't you think it would be worthier to wait one maybe two years for ATI open source drivers to improve? They will have beautiful drivers, maybe even better than NVIDIA and I think it's worth to torture yourself one maybe two years with open source/fglrx drivers. I really do think so and i think ATI does think the same.

There are two lemonade stands. First lemonade stand I go to tells me that they will add the lemonade mix in 2 years, until then I can drink their water.

The second lemonade stand serves me lemonade instantly with ice.

The only people that would wait two years are those already do very odd and questionable things that defy common sense in new and interesting ways.

[mirv]

You can't really compare the open source ati driver with nvidia binary drivers.
Now let's compare open source ati against open source nvidia....

[RealNC]

NVidia binaries are more worth than ATI's open source + fglrx put together

[Kano]

Well nvidia oss drivers are really bad, but the binary drivers are what you would expect from a driver. fglrx is below standard and ati oss is improving but very limited. You can compare ati oss with intel drivers from features.

[gsmd]

OK, used a 9400gt for some time and must say that nVidia totally rocks. 1080p output via hdmi just works with cpu load around 3-5% (xbmc). And I haven't even touched xorg.conf! And why should I care if the thing is opensource or not?!

[tball]

OK, used a 9400gt for some time and must say that nVidia totally rocks. 1080p output via hdmi just works with cpu load around 3-5% (xbmc). And I haven't even touched xorg.conf! And why should I care if the thing is opensource or not?!

Yeah why should we care if its opensource or not?

I personally like when I install linux, I don't have to download a binary closed driver to get my network working. I also like when I play song on my newly installed distro, that I don't have to find and download a soundcarddriver... Ohh, and I also like when my motherboard seem to work without special binary closed ATA/SATA drivers. Hmm, I guess I like opensource.

Actually I will also like when I plug in my livecd for my favorite distro, and get flawless KMS and dri2 driven composite with my radeon card + while I browse the internet and listen to music with the buildin open source drivers for my networkcard and soundcard ;-)

[RealNC]

I don't like all this because I can't update the drivers. They're embedded in the kernel. I prefer to update them when new versions come out rather than wait for the linux kernel to update them all at once and also break stuff. Why should I update the kernel? I just need the drivers.

[mirv]

it's called using modules....

[tball]

I don't like all this because I can't update the drivers. They're embedded in the kernel. I prefer to update them when new versions come out rather than wait for the linux kernel to update them all at once and also break stuff. Why should I update the kernel? I just need the drivers.

After my expirence its the opposite. Binary drivers break when new kernel releases. New kernel releases contains new open source drivers, which is designed to run on the specified kernel, so it won't break.

As mirv says, you can always just download new drivers from xorg.org, and compile it to your kernel. Then you can have old kernels with new drivers.

If you don't like to compile things, just install Arch, which is always updated with the latest stable driver releases.