So my last computer had a massive failure that would cost more to fix than the computer was worth. It happens.
This time, when selecting a new machine, I steered clear of Intel (another story there sometime) and Nvidia. I instead settled on an AMD Phenom II X4 945 3 Ghz and an HIS ATI RadeonHD 4670 (1 GB GDDR3). Needless to say, this system blows the older Core 2 Duo and Geforce 9500GT 512MB GDDR3 system I had away, but there’s some added bonuses in here for persons who use Linux, and a few perks that seem to apply no matter what OS you use.
Nvidia has been grinding my gears for a few years and I’ve had enough:
Aside from the political activities of their Board of Directors, several of which donated $10,000 to help pass the bigoted Proposition 8 in California. (Source: Publicly available donor list), their video cards are overpriced and still manage to under-perform similarly priced RadeonHD models. (The RadeonHD 4670 outperforms the Geforce 9500GT by a factor of two to three, at about $20 cheaper).
What *really* destroyed Nvidia’s chances of selling me another card in the future though is their terrible support for Linux.
The biggest single user experience problem with Nvidia’s driver is that the installer is not user friendly, it requires you to make X shut down which is not always easy. If the installer bombs out for any of 1,000 reasons, the errors are unhelpful, and you have to redo everything each time you rebuild a kernel. Having an Nvidia card on Linux puts you on a very short leash, and sometimes stops you from building your own kernel or even using development kernels. Sometimes even final release kernels are a no-no for weeks until Nvidia catches up.
Almost everyone has heard the cliche that “It only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch”. On Linux, Nvidia is that bad apple, because it’s like, here’s 95% of your hardware that the kernel supports and you never have to think about, and here’s one device with a horribly conceived installer for an out of tree driver that doubles the work needed to run your own kernel. If that wasn’t enough, having the Nvidia driver installed invalidates all your kernel bug reports, is frequently the cause of crashes, lags months or years behind new features in X or the kernel (Like the eternal promise of RandR 1.2 support and always the excuse that it supports their crappy TwinView instead), runs a binary blob with kernel permissions that could be executing anything on your computer or causing security holes (say goodbye to being able to do a real security audit), and generally drinks the blood of puppies. (That part is a slight exaggeration)
And that’s why I’m not going to be recommending Nvidia to anyone I talk to from now on. You can run into the same number of problems that Nvidia causes your Linux distribution just by formatting Linux off and returning to Windows.
You can run a fully functional Linux system with an ATI RadeonHD without finding binary drivers. The binary ATI driver does provide faster performance on some models, but you don’t need it just to have 3d acceleration and all the features of X.
If Nvidia tried this behavior with Windows users, it would be the longest suicide note in PC history… I’m switching over to ATI’s line of cards from now on regardless of which OS I choose.
