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Comment by Unosolo | Hacker News Reader

Poor GPU support (lack of drivers) is still a major deal-breaker for home and media use. As of now hardware should still be selected on the basis of available driver support and it's a major obstacle and the situation doesn't seem to have improved significantly since 3-5 years ago.

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I suspect it can't improve much more without a paradigm shift. That could be OEMs shipping Linux pre-installed along with working hardware and the necessary drivers. Or it could be having a better abstraction so that Nvidia & ATI can keep parts of their drivers closed without the regular version mismatches with the open source world. I think that's part of Canonical's plans for Mir.

The only problem I have is with the Nvidia drivers, especially Optimus/separate video card on my laptop which doesn't work. :(

But the stock Intel driver works well enough, just don't want to figure out what sort of CLI cargo cult fixing it will take to get it going.

Have you tried using bumblebee[1]? I use it on my Samsung QX411 which has an NVidia GeForce GT 525M video card along with the onboard Intel. The Intel card is used by default at all times. If you want to run a program using the NVidia card, just prepend 'optirun' to the command.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee

For me bumblebee works, but then the DisplayPort is useless. It would be awesome if bumblebee could automatically detect that the laptop is docked and turned on the external graphics to enable proper functioning of DisplayPort. Or even not automatically, but simpler than uninstalling/installing bumblebee (and fixing the mess it did to config files everytime).

I tried bumblebee it on 12.10, after unsuccessfully trying to install Nvidia drivers. It was...not a good experience. Ended up reinstalling 12.10 just to get Unity and a reasonable resolution back. I have no doubt that there was a fix (possibly involving xorg.conf editing) but I had already spent so much time it and I needed to get work done. Hopefully the new release is better here, but I don't hold much hope.

I'm not blaming bumblebee specifically here, it's just a pervasive side effect of Linux and the modular approach. I can really appreciate the integration that goes in to a Mac.

I'm sure experiences vary greatly depending on the mix of hardware. I remember having to tweak some things to get bumblebee to work properly (or maybe I had to recompile from the source) but it's worked flawlessly since. This is on Ubuntu 12.04.

pkolaczk does bring up a good issue about the DisplayPort not working properly though. I don't use an external display on my laptop and have never played with that.

On another note, I remember installing 12.10 on my desktop right around the time it came out. My desktop has a Radeon HD3870 video card which was completely incompatible with Unity. I don't remember the issue exactly but my choice was either to use the open source drivers or have the desktop environment fail to show at all with ATI's drivers. I just did a search and I guess the fix is to downgrade X-Server and install a legacy driver. It's a shame something as central to the user experience as GUI performance still doesn't work out of the box or worse yet, critically breaks on an upgrade.

All the hardware I purchased in the past several years works with most GNU/Linux distros. There is some minor problems sometimes, but usually they do not force me to purchase hardware specifically for it.

My new GTX card works great, Steam games (that have been ported to Linux), Minecraft (awesome!), all run great?

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