[jiggy2011]

True, the issue in particular with "hardware support" is that the biggest problems desktop users seem to run into with Ubuntu is video drivers for nvidia/ATI and it doesn't seem like there's much canonical can do about those anyway.

[dfc]

ATI drivers? The open source ATI drivers have progressed wonderfully recently. I never even flirt with the idea of tainting my desktops or laptops with proprietary drivers. The situation is different with nvidia but I am still happy with the machine I have with an old nvidia card I purchased for mining btc.

What problems do people have with the free ATI drivers?

[jiggy2011]

This is from June, here are some benchmarks of the proprietary Catalyst driver vs the open source driver built into ubuntu.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r...

I'd be shocked if they'd made up that huge gap in 3 months.

[dfc]

I have never noticed any performance problems with free ATI drivers. Have you used the free drivers and thought it felt sluggish?

[jdjb]

I only use nvidia cards (with the proprietary drivers) because they were the only ones I could find with decent framerates playing something like Minecraft at 1080p resolution.

Do the free ATI drivers get 60fps (or even 30fps @ 1080p resolution) for most full screen games? If so, could you tell me which model of card you are achieving this with?

[jiggy2011]

I switched to an nvidia card about a year ago because the free ATI drivers either gave terrible OpenGL performance or some apps didn't work at all because features were missing from the drivers and the proprietary drivers gave me all kinds of horrible glitches.

[lucian1900]

They're ok for anything but games (for which I use windows anyway), but the power management sucks. I get 3-4.5h with the free driver and 6-7h with the blob.