In the Linux land 99% of the applications are open source. It is part of the nature of the GNU/Linux community ecosystem to endorse open software. But there are a few applications that are not open and as they fill up a niche, they are pretty popular. Come in and vote for your favorite.
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Member since:2006-07-13
Member since:2005-11-18
Well for things like MythTV with HDTV having the binary only drivers greatly reduces the load on your system for decoding. The same is true for DVDs etc.
Now don't get me wrong, if AMD/ATI open up some on their video cards my next gen card would be from them for sure. It's just that there really isn't much of an OSS alternative for real 3D performance drivers.
Member since:2005-06-29
So does the radeon and nv driver. The ATI proprietary drivers aren't any better on video, and neither is nvidia's.
They're really pretty much only helpful for GL. Although, the radeon driver hasn't been working right on my dual monitor setup so I had to switch to the proprietary one (the free one made white horizontal lines when there were large numbers of changes on the screen).
And the Nvidia driver provides a lot better dual monitor support than nv+xinerama, but the radeon driver provides its own similar stuff so it's really in the same class for dual head.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-06
There are not really enough results yet to say this definitively but it is interesting that the graphic cards drivers are considered so popular. Is Desktop eyecandy really that important to everyone ?
The nVidia and ATi accelerated drivers are important for more than just "eyecandy" as you apparently are implying. Without them, 2D performance is fairly limiting. In fact, both of the drivers (at last check) also provided acceleration needed for video playback (dvd, etc.). Finally, some of us have work that actually requires 3D acceleration -- which has nothing to do with eyecandy or games.