[mylittlepony]

I knew Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was going to make a difference. I've been using it in my desktop and I love it, everything works out of the box (sound, video, etc), and you can find anything you want in the software center. Now I only use Windows for games.

[mbell]

Unless you have an AMD graphics card, in which case you get to deal with all kinds of corruption in general desktop use.

[krzyk]

Opensource radeon driver is pretty good if you don't need 3D. I would actually say that it is much better then the AMD one - there are no problems with suspend and the card initializes more quickly.

[muyuu]

I take it you will need 3D if you are in the market for Steam.

I also went through all sorts of hell with proprietary AMD/ATI drivers, and I needed them for OpenCL. To this day my Desktop is a pain to use but OpenCL works fine. Sadly they make the best cards for this purpose by far, otherwise I would get something else.

[lucian1900]

Yes, except for power usage. The blob is much, much better at keeping my laptop's battery alive.

[marshray]

Or an Nvidia, or an Intel, or ... All accelerated cards have had their share of bugs.

[muyuu]

Intel run pretty flawlessly. They're just comparatively underpowered for gaming.

[marshray]

That has not been my experience, but admittedly it has been many years since I bought anything with Intel graphics.