[Eug-lug] Nvidia ickiness

[Allen C Brown]

T. Joseph CARTER said the following on 06/27/2005 03:49 PM:
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 12:09:57PM -0700, Allen C Brown wrote:
> 
>>I had an Nvidia TNT.  Never worked well under Linux.  Its
>>a doorstop now.  After that experience I won't buy Nvidia.
> 
> You realize that's like saying the '76 Ford was crappy, so
> you'll never buy a Ford again, right?

In fact, I won't buy Ford.  I buy Toyota.  The US car manufacturers
didn't give a crap about quality until Japan started eating
their lunch.  But even after they "saw the light" they never
caught up.

> The Riva TNT is a decade old, literally--maybe a little older.
> It's competition was the Voodoo combo 2/3D card, which was
> equally crappy.  The TNT2 varied quite a bit from one
> manufacturer to another (the card is not made by NVidia, just
> the chipset.)

I bought mine new, inside a Dell.  And when it was new it
didn't have any better Linux support.  So age doesn't excuse
them of anything.

The NVidia specs were never released, even after it was
clearly obsolete.  Given a choice I will always buy from
manufacturers who release specs so that an open source
driver can be written.

This is really important if you want to be able to occasionally
update your install/kernel.  Otherwise you are hostage to
NVidia deciding they don't care about Linux drivers any more.

I like to keep my hardware for a long time.

> I've had three TNT's in my time, two worked great, one only
> worked properly in Windows, and only for some version of
> properly that means I couldn't tell whether the crashes were
> video related or not.
> 
> 
> (That said, ATI has a more affordable card these days.  I just
> wouldn't trust their drivers for much of anything..)

I now run Debian.  No proprietary drivers.  I bought an
ATI FireGL X1.  ATI could go belly up tomorrow, but the
2.8 kernel released in 2007 would support it.
-- 
Allen Brown
   work: Agilent Technologies      non-work: http://www.peak.org/~abrown/
         allen_brown at agilent.com	            abrown at peak.org
   There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
   --- Sir Winston Churchill