As i wrote the laptop now works out of the box - what i describe was 12 years ago, which is practically ancient history in terms of software. The only issue is

As i wrote the laptop now works out of the box - what i describe was 12 years ago, which is practically ancient history in terms of software. The only issue is that because Nvidia only provides closed source drivers and they decided they do not want to support the laptop's GPU anymore, there is no way to use any newer drivers from it. But that is because of Nvidia, not because of Linux. I could even install a recent distro on my mid-2000s ATI X1950 Pro-based PC if i wanted as that has an open source driver. I'm not sure what the link is meant to show - or really what exactly it refers to (EDIT: or if it is even relevant, the post is already 4 years old). The AMD driver is part of the Linux kernel this days, you don't need to install anything. AMD has its own alternative driver if you -e.g.- need their OpenGL implementation, but pretty much nobody uses that stuff nor is any software tested on it. Basically unless you have some very specific software needs, chances are trying to install AMD's drivers is going to have both worse performance and a ton of issues.