From what I understand that was about them not cooperating with the kernel devs. and that their driver was a black box that had to interact with half the kernel

From what I understand that was about them not cooperating with the kernel devs. and that their driver was a black box that had to interact with half the kernel didn't help. Driver wise my worst experiences where all solidly in the ATI/AMD binary camp, with the constant need to exorcise nouveau from various systems second.