Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

True, but i915_* and radeon_* also figure prominently. I don't believe kerneloops.org provides
conclusive evidence that the Free graphics drivers are any more reliable than nvidia. My own
(subjective) experiences with a number of i915 and nvidia machines are similar. Both run pretty
well, but the intel machines aren't immune to problems.

Personally I think the claim of FUD has some merit. The nvidia driver isn't perfect, but I don't see
evidence that the Free drivers are doing a significantly better job, and nvidia have demonstrably
better performance.

If you want to use only Free software, then fine. If you're unhappy with the additional maintenance
overhead, or the fact that nvidia drop support for older cards out of newer drivers then that's also
fine. However, If you want to claim the nvidia drivers are bug-ridden and imply that the Free
drivers are intrinsically more reliable then, at the moment, I don't think the evidence is there.

Well, kerneloops doesn't include much data from real crashes, since it's usually too late for automatic submit of crash log once the machine completely stops responding. Well, you can grab the panic message via serial console and post it to bugzilla or mailing list, but nobody does that for nvidia drivers for obvious reason.

Secondly, most kerneloops data is collected from bleeding edge and development releases. More reports from non-nvidia hardware generally mean more development is happening there.

When it comes to stable Linux-based OS-es, let's consider RHEL 5 (I haven't used other comparable OS-es, but I believe most widely used enterprise-class distribution is a pretty good example). ATi and Intel works mostly flawlessly there compared to NVidia, which for example can not resume from suspend, or freezes for minutes (on T61, again fairly common platform). And no, no kerneloops messages were sent for it.