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Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?
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I'm thinking about getting a new laptop with the above on. Can anyone advise how good ATI's Linux drivers are? I have run laptops with nvidia cards very successfully, but in the past ATI's support has been lacking.
I have found with the open source drivers often things like movies don't play very well on nvidia cards and you certainly can't play things like Second Life without proprietary nvidia drivers. If ATI supply drivers that work as well as nvidia I'll be happy!
If you're looking for opensource support, go for ATI, if you're looking for performance and stability (with binary blob), go for NVIDIA, although I hear that ATI proprietary drivers (fglrx) are getting better with every release.
If you're looking for opensource support, go for ATI, if you're looking for performance and stability (with binary blob), go for NVIDIA, although I hear that ATI proprietary drivers (fglrx) are getting better with every release.
Serafean
I'd much rather use open source drivers, but you have to be pragmatic at times! I don't see the pint in having great hardware if I can't use it properly and at least for the moment nvidia allows that.
HD4870.. cat 10.7 work fine but sometimes install reqire a little wrench and bolts attention..(name it Second Display,driver install etc.. ) In stability nvidia blobs are better.
With my ASUS EAH4350 Silent, FGLRX works fine (and in most cases the card screams through Compiz and Mutter with it). I'm sure if you have FGLRX with the 5470, it will work just fine. But I'm not so sure about how the community is going to respond when you need proprietary drivers to get your GPU working.
Not sure what you mean about help with proprietary drivers and the open source community. Mandriva (and indeed your flavour, Ubuntu I believe) has the drivers in the repository.
Archlinux for example completely removed fglrx from their official repositories (too many problems with it, apparently), thats an example of community response. but in most cases, people help whatever drivers you use. With some problems though (such as hardware accelerated video playback with ATI) 99% of people would laugh in your face.
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