Having been bitten in the past by the
proprietary NVidia drivers, this time I'm leaning towards the r300
series of ATI cards, as they are supported by OS drivers. (Actually,
I'd prefer one of the r200 series of cards, but I haven't found one
with a PCIe interface.) But since the r300 driver is based on reverse
engineering, I'm not sure if this is a safe choice. Could someone who
uses it tell about his/her experiences, especially stability-wise?
I've been using the r300 driver on a desktop with a Radeon X800 (PCI-E) card and a laptop with built-in Mobile Radeon 9700 (AGP). Both on Fedora 6 and working without problems, including the compiz desktop. Some applications update a bit slow on the 3d desktop (especially on the 9700), which can be worked around by dropping the colordepth to 16 bits. Both systems are rock solid, no crashes due to the display driver. There's sometimes a glitch in compiz which makes window borders disappear, which could be a driver problem, but it's easily fixes by restarting compiz.
Klaasjan
