HD5850 suffering from tearing - challenge to ATI 5xxx owners

[elanthis]

We aren't seeing much of that in the consumer side; it's tough even getting board & system vendors to ship Linux drivers on their CDs.

It would be absolutely retarded to put drivers on a CD like that. They'd work for whatever smattering of kernel revisions were in popular distros approximately 6 months prior to the hardware being shipped, which pretty much means RHEL 5 and an "ancient" version of Ubuntu (probably the prior LTS release) and nothing else.

The Linux kernel driver API situation basically is as user unfriendly as possible. If you want a new driver, you have to update your entire kernel, which generally involves updating core kernel-related userspace utilities, which basically means upgrading your entire distro, which in turn means that getting a new video card or whatever installed is going to require massive changes to your desktop stack and a shitload of new bugs in apps that used to work just fine thank you. Lord help you if you need a new disk controller driver that came out in the last 6 months that thus isn't on the distro's installation CD kernel, because there's no chance in hell that the distro could ever hope to load a generic driver off a USB key or floppy drive like you have been able to do for over a decade durings Windows installations (and yes, this HAS happened to me... with AMD southbridges, no less; had to download a Rawhide nightly CD just to get Linux installed on both machines). I don't even care that much about a stable ABI; if you could at least pop in a source package with DKLM-like system and expect it to compile and work, that would be perfectly acceptable to me. Hell, outright ban non-GPL kernel modules. Just don't force users to upgrade EVERYTHING just to get a single new piece of hardware installed.

Linux is for developers, not users. Good for us (usually), but not for that 90% Windows marketshare userbase.

[emergence]

Because, of all things, you experience tearing while moving windows?

Oh most definitely. It's extremely annoying that I get tearing when I move windows. It's as if my desktop is somehow broken. Do you know how it feels when you boot into an OS and the graphics drivers are not installed, everything seems weird. That's how it feels with tearing windows.