George Staikos on Linux Drivers and KDE (LinMagAu)

George Staikos on Linux Drivers and KDE (LinMagAu)

Can I have a bit of the crack George (or the interviewer -- I'm not sure) is smoking? What does "ATI have been providing open source Linux drivers provided by an employed 3rd party" mean? The DRI project? Since when is the DRI project an "employed 3rd party"? Some money changed hands (from the weather channel to Tungsten) in order to develop a driver for the Radeon 8500 (2 generations old in the meantime). There are "other" third party drivers for ATI cards (which support the current generation of cards, AFAIR), but they are not open source. And then there's ATI's "own" drivers for Linux (which are actually developed by a third party AFAIUI), and those are very binary-only, but support the current cards -- for some people they seem to work very well and for others they are horrible. And to add confusion to the whole issue, there's the fact that you can download drivers from ATI's website (here's a direct link, for which to have clicked on some EULA, take notice) or from Schneider Digital. The ones from Schneider eventually show up at ATI's website. Last time it took about two months IIRC.

Don't take this the wrong way. I love ATI, they are a great company, I've been buying their hardware for over 15 years. The only other company's hardware I like better than ATI's is Matrox, but Matrox stopped being a competitor in the 3D area long ago. Matrox's still got superb picture quality, but that's about it. ATI's picture quality is not as good, but it's better than NVIDIA's (not hard, really). But I still haven't got a Radeon 9x00 because that card is NOT supported by any open source driver, and the binary ones have sucked monkey ass every time I've tried them (slow, crash-prone, error-prone, pick any three). And as far as I _know_ (I'd be gladly proven wrong) ATI is not providing documentation to support the "advanced" features of the R300 chip. The NVIDIA proposition is way far from perfect, but at least they tend to treat Linux the same they treat Windows (which might or might not be positive -- NVIDIA has a not-so-nice customer-relations record)