3 ms·
First of all, they are closed. Second, they do all sorts of stupid non-standard stuff, so you can't use KMS, a framebuffer or xrandr[1]. The GUI application fo
by slowpoke 14y ago
First of all, they are closed.
Second, they do all sorts of stupid non-standard stuff, so you can't use KMS,
a framebuffer or xrandr[1]. The GUI application for managing monitors sucks balls
and isn't scriptable. I happen to use some older monitors, and that gives me all
sorts of pains, too.
To be somewhat fair, it used to be even worse. But it's still nowhere near decent,
and will never be unless they open the specs and release the source for the drivers.
In the future, I will exclusively use Intel Graphics. While they aren't perfect
either (from what I could gather), at least the drivers are open, which already
places them light-years ahead of nvidia and ATI. For the record, my netbook never
had a single graphics-related problem, while I lost count of how often I cursed
nvidia for their shitty drivers on my desktop.
[1] Support was apparently added to the current beta, but I haven't tried it yet.
- jrockway 14y agoWe're talking about using OS X because the system has an nVidia graphics card. OS X is much more closed (and unconfigurable) than Linux + nVidia, so "nVidia's drivers are closed" doesn't seem like a good reason to not switch to Linux. Yes, they're closed, but at least you can use XMonad and apt-get. Personally, I think nVidia's drivers are fine, modulo the ideology issues. They perform extremely well and work. Intel's drivers also work well, though the performance is not as good. (And video tends to tear due to some vblank syncing bug that's unfixable for some reason.) I also agree that xrandr support is important for a laptop, because you are often plugging and unplugging an external monitor. xrandr --output VGA1 --left-of LVDS1 is much easier than dealing with some GUI. xrandr seems to work on my nVidia desktop, however.