"NVidia is great!" - Umm, no?

[Evan Leibovitch]

Giles Orr wrote:
> I recently purchased a NVidia video card, an XFX GeForce 6800 XTreme -
> AGP 8X, 256Mb DDR3 dual DVI.  Why isn't quite clear because I'm not a
> gamer, but it's a dual head card and I like things to run smoothly.  I
> bought it because fans of Open Source pretty much uniformly told me
> that NVidia products were really good, the way to go for high end
> video.  I beg to differ.
>   
I think that many of the kinds of problems you encountered might also
apply to the way ATI cards are handled.

> It took several days before I finally found a very small statement in
> someone's mailing list archive that the "nv" driver doesn't support
> dual head.  Sounds like it never has and possibly never will.  So here
> I am with two lovely LCD monitors I expected to run with my awesome
> new NVidia card, and unable to do so with the free driver.
It's not surprising that the folks who must write the drivers by
reverse-engineering closed chipsets can't support every function. OTOH,
at least in ATI-land, the free driver supports the extensions needed to
support Compiz/Beryl/etc and the proprietary one doesn't.

> I had avoided the "nvidia" driver not so much because I'm an OS fanatic
> (although I prefer to avoid proprietary software), but because
> installing it requires digging into the kernel.
This problem is on I suspect that distributions can address. Lately I've
been playing with a few distros -- Mepis, PCLOS, SuSE 10.3 and Kubuntu
"Gutsy" -- some of them in pre-release form. Some of these distros have
a very smooth way of switching from the free to proprietary video
drivers, the new Ubuntu method is actually quite slick, especially for
post-install switching.

Unless you're playing with the kernel for other reasons, there's no
reason you should have to get into it just over the video drivers. If
you really want to stay with a reasonably pure debian core, consider Mepis.

> This is definitely a place where Linux does NOT "just work."  I ain't
> defecting to Windows or anything like that, but I really, really, wish
> this all worked better.
>   
Personally, I think this is a packaging issue more than anything else,
and that some packagers care about this issue more than others. Some
distributions excel at the video driver switching, and you don' t have
to give up the stability of Debian to try them.

(BTW, of the ones above, I will probably stick with either Mepis or
Kubuntu. I'm pissed that Kubuntu hosed my system without apology when I
tried to upgrade from Feisty to pre-release Gutsy. If it needs a
re-install to be done cleanly -- or if they simply can't get major
upgrades down properly -- they should be honest about it and at least
have a way to back out. But the new release is quite fine.)

- Evan
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