[TriLUG] Macbook Curious

[Bill Farrow]

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 6:07 AM, Matt Flyer <matt at noway2.thruhere.net> wrote:
> heard that ATI, at least used to be a problem with Linux, with nVidia
> being the big player.  I was recently reading some reviews on some
> sandybridge  motherboards and it mentioning that the Intel graphics
> worked.  It seems like Linux hardware support from the vendor is
> becoming less of an issue, thankfully.

Intel is an active contributer to Xorg, they provide GPL drivers for
their chipsets and developers who work on improving Xorg.

ATI provides a proprietary driver (fglrx) for their graphics chips,
and they now release their docs to Xorg developers which has lead to
better GPL drivers (radeon).

NVidia only provides a proprietary driver that works very well, except
when upgrading your Linux OS.  There is an open source 3d driver
(vouveau) being developed through reverse engineering.

I am running all three.  Nvidia on my MythTV box so that I get h/w
video playback acceleration, ATI at work with multiple monitors, and
Intel on my quad core desktop.

If you want really fast 3D graphics and don't care about running
proprietary code at kernel level, go with Nvidia.  If you want open
source code, good performance, community support, go with Intel or
ATI.

Bill