Radeon on Linux

In the past ATI driver support in Linux has been horrible. I was just wondering, has this gotten any better? I heard that ATI has open-sourced their drivers. Do they now compare to what nVidia offers in Linux?

 

If you don't run compiz, the experience will be a bliss. If you run compiz say goodbye to any 3d games and to hardware accelerated video playback, you can't run those with any compositing software enabled.

 

I will second that, it's not a big deal for me though to disable compiz when I watch a video or play a game (does that ever really happen for Windows users using Linux?). I'm sure that if bored enough I could create a script to disable compiz when program X launches and enable it once closed.

 

Would that simply be a matter of replacing the shortcut's command with a script that basically does the following?

[Disable Compiz]
[Execute game/video player (command used by the program shortcut)]
[Enable Compiz]

I'd be very interested to see how you would tackle it.

The reason I'm asking about the drivers, is that I'm looking at new laptops, and while I do really like the lower heat/power requirements of the Radeon mobile GPU's, one thing I will be doing with this machine is dual-booting Linux.

 

Check out the website, http://www.phoronix.com

They have a forum and the discussions often regard the nvidia and ati hardware and drivers.

It sounds like ati still is a major headache to use and is often frustrating for Linux users. I would love to switch to ati but it sounds too problematic. Even though it's open source, there are still more problems compared to nvidia. Linux might not be that much of a priority compared to Windows and therefore, there isn't enough of a R&D group to develop and maintain the drivers crucial to mainstream and even graphical use.

 

Well, the way I think would be most logical is to have a blacklist of programs that use compiz (would have to manually enter programs, for now at least). Then, whenever a program is opened/closed, check if any processes have the same tag as ones that are in the black list, if there aren't, re-enable compiz, otherwise just leave it. Slightly more resource usage but you don't need to change each shortcut.