[H-GEN] Going Open source

[Daniel Devine]

> and I haven't had much problems with Xorg and nVidia or ATI graphics
> cards of the recent years.

 The support for ATi has been getting better, though with NVIDIA it has 
 always been smooth sailing for me.
 Thanks to Gallium3D ATi and Nvidia are both getting very good *open 
 source* drivers.

 Gallium3D takes a lot of the effort out of creating and maintaining 
 graphics drivers (not just under Linux but any OS that implements 
 Gallium3D - AROS and one day Haiku - theoretically Windows too) by 
 creating a common code-base for features that most cards hold common 
 (such as the OpenGL stack) and that way only a small bit of hardware 
 related code has to be written for all the different hardware.
 
 Unfortunately if you are playing newer 3D games under Wine the 
 Gallium3D based drivers aren't quite there yet. They work with older 3D 
 games (DX8 level, basic DX9 level) and with things keep progressing like 
 they are they are making they *will* get up to speed soon!. If you don't 
 really need advanced 3D the open drivers are ready to use now (though 
 power management is a bit iffy).

 The integration of open source drivers is always better than that of 
 closed drivers which are basically shoehorned into a distro and have to 
 be re-compiled every time the kernel is updated...

 Also, if you haven't tried Fedora in a few years give it another go 
 because Ubuntu has been steadily getting worse for a while now. Don't 
 give me the "oh but Red hat..." or "...RPM..." tripe that has not be 
 valid for years now.

-- 
 Daniel Devine