AMD seems to be doing something to make their support better for newer 
cards. Something about an opensource thing they'll add to the kernel, and 
their drivers will talk to that.  Hopefully fixing most of the issues 
they've had over the years.

Their cards do typically take more effort to get to work, but when they 
work, everything works.  My nvidia card?  Everytime I boot, after I finally 
got brightness control to work at all, it is set at full blast.  There are 
various settings in the settings menu that doesn't seem to be set unless 
you open the settings menu.  By the way, I'm running an AMD card in my 
desktop... VoidLinux does an awesome job. First distro it "just worked" and 
has kept working, without me fighting with it.

But yes, back in the day, they both sucked but Nvidia typiclaly worked.  
Now both of them work, but you have to try if you want everything working 
well.  


On Tuesday, February 3, 2015 at 6:38:08 PM UTC-6, Antonio Malcolm wrote:
>
> That's odd- I've always experienced the opposite, ie: the proprietary 
> Nvidia driver has typically worked for me, and the open source Nouveau 
> driver has typically given me issues.
> Also, I've always needed to do some finagling to get ATI drivers to work, 
> but that's likely because I've typically installed my Linux rollouts on 
> Apple laptops, and dealing with their combination of GMUX hardware/GPU 
> hardware configuration and non-standard UEFI implemenation is a pain in the 
> arse, and has required rolling a kernel (of course, it didn't help that I 
> was running Debian, which uses an older kernel), and telling it where to 
> find the Radeon BIOS. Add to that, on my 2011 MBP, vgaswitcheroo works, but 
> something in the way MBP-specific GPU switching in the kernel extensions is 
> written (and the code, written by some guys at Red Hat, looks like it was 
> written a decade ago) causes the Radeon to crap out during subsequent 
> power-cycling (works the first time, not on additional tries), so I ended 
> up writing my own user-space utility for handling that.
>
> From what I understand, the proprietary Nvidia drivers are better, 
> especially performance-wise, than the proprietary ATI drivers, and, from 
> dealing with both, I feel like Nvidia provide much more love to the Linux 
> community than ATI. This may be partly because a lot of high-end animation 
> and rendering workstations use Nvidia workstation-class GPUs for their 
> crunching, and much of that software is either Linux-native, or comes with 
> a Linux version (Maya immediately comes to mind), and Linux is used fairly 
> often in those scenarios. Admittedly, that's a bit of speculation, on my 
> part, but it's based on honest observation (I know folks in those 
> industries, so I have that as a starting point, at least).
>
> Anyhow, GPU support is one of the biggest pains in the arse I deal with 
> during a Linux install.
> However, there are definitely the other reasons I gave up on Cinnamon and 
> went with Openbox and Compton. That Cinnamon overrides certain Xorg 
> configs, and absorbs others in odd ways is the biggest. Conflicting with 
> the GPU driver was sort of the last straw.
>
> I was using Linux as a server/hosting OS, mostly, and OS X as my 
> *Nix-based desktop. I got tired of the bloat and half-baked features, 
> which, over the last few revisions have stepped on my feet more and more 
> and more.
> I want lean, I want out-of-my-way. I find KDE to be incredibly bloated, 
> and both KDE and XFCE have wayyy too many settings panes/apps for my taste. 
> Most of that is stuff I'd typically set in a config file somewhere, and 
> touch maybe once in a blue moon- i.e., I don't really need a GUI for most 
> of it. I don't particularly care for the look and feel of either LXDE or 
> MATE, and I'll stay away from GNOME for the same reasons I dropped Cinnamon.
> My current Openbox stack is doing a great job. It's easy enough to theme 
> it the way I want, with lxappearance-obconf and the standard config files. 
> It simply obeys those, it's lean, it's reliable, and it performs well.
>
>