I have heard good things about ATI on Linux, but perhaps the problems are only a personnel issue? Suffice it to say that if I'm going to be keeping Linux on my desktop that my next video card will be ATI, which means that my current frustrations are due to Nvidia ownershp.
I couldn't complain enough about Linux with Nvidia cards... The worst part is, my card is something like 8 years old now (The old Dell is still going strong as ever now) so it's a legacy card they won't even open source, it's not like they are ever going to make money from the drivers for Gforce4 ever again...
I have a 2 year old laptop with Nvidia. The driver installer is surprisingly smart (and not in a bad way). I have working accelerated OpenGL 3.3. It doesn't suck, as far as tained kernel modules go.
I wouldn't expect miracles with an 8 year old card though.
Nvidia does a decent job with new GPU's when it comes to 3d and basic graphics. It did a good job with the old GPU's too, but I guess the old drivers aren't maintained a lot.
However, the Nvidia binary driver still lacks some features when it comes to multiple displays, etc. HDMI connect/disconnect does not work on a laptop. There's no Xrandr support yet, so hotplugging displays and screen rotation, etc is not quite there. X has to be restarted more often than I want.
I've heard they're working on Xrandr and other stuff. I still think that they should be open sourced, though.
