ATI vs NVidia on Ubuntu
For the last few months I have spent countless hours battling with the proprietary (and open source) drivers for my ATI Radeon X700 card under Ubuntu. Yesterday I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon and spent a good four hours trying to get my dual screen setup working again but without any luck.
So, this morning I decided to give NVidia a go and went and purchased a new Asus EN7200GS card for a miserly NZ$80. Success! Straight off the bat too. Well, almost. I plugged it in, enabled the restricted driver, restarted and enabled the second monitor and it’s all working perfectly apart from the fact that I can’t run the ge-whiz Compiz Fusion fancy interface. Everything else is nice though - I’m finally running Google Earth and Stellarium smoothly too.
ATI have been making noises for a while now that they are going to release open source drivers but I say too little too late. I won’t be going back to ATI for a loooooong time.
If you’re running Ubuntu, have two screens and don’t want to ever have to type sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf again then I recommend NVidia.
