Kubuntu 09.04 (Jaunty) has been an absolute pleasure to use on my home desktop. Everything just works, and works really well. I happen to choose an Nvidia graphics card when I put it together. Turns out that was a very good decision. Lets turn to my laptop (a Thinkpad T42). It has an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 inside. There is a semi decent open source driver implementation that it used by default....
When XFree86 restricted their license in 2004, the result was a fork into the dominant X window manager we know today – X.org. At the time, just about everyone was pissed off at XFree’s sheer arrogance. Thankfully xorg and freedesktop.org pulled everything together and in very short order (relatively speaking) all the major distributions swapped their X server. I mistakenly thought at the time that the progress in the X server would digress – that forks were disruptive to software development....
I’ve have struggled through driver hell trying to get Beryl to work with my graphics card an ATI Mobility 9600, only to be rebuffed, defeated, and vowing never to buy an ATI product as long as I live. If I had a desktop, I would have been on Newegg ordering a replacement weeks ago, but unfortunately, constrained with laptop hardware (where ATI has the dominant marketshare), I am left cursing ATI’s dismal driver support (and I hear from Jeff it’s even a problem with their Window’s drivers, which is even more unbelievable)....