If a kernel update makes a user's screen goes blurry in the forest and there's no developer there to hear it, does it make a sound?

In no way are you forced to run the very latest version of whatever distro you prefer. More often than not, an older one will run better.

If, as you say, Squeeze "works"* why not allow others to dist-upgrade before you so they encounter the bulk of the bugs?

If a kernel update makes your sound go away just reinstall PulseAudio. Well that's what worked for me, when I rebooted after a recent security update to the kernel and discovered the sound server wouldn't start, no way no how.

Its got nothing to do with how upto date his distro is the problem is not the newness of the distro or even the distro itself, the well known ATI Radeon open and the closed fglrx driver situation is totally distro agnostic take a look over at the phoronix.com forums for more information on ATI's crappy drivers everything from video lag, no vsynch, black area appearing for no valid reason in firefox the list is pretty much endless one which i experienced first hand after purchasing an ATI Radeon which has now been ditched from my linux machine and replaced with an NVidia.

Feel sorry for the guy, the best advice i received was "dont buy ATI if your a linux user" and thats advice i now pass on to other others, NVidia may be in league with the closed source devil but i dont care as their drivers work. He will be lucky if they fix the video issues within a year as ATI/AMD dont seem to be to fussed about linux and they apparently dont have many devs assigned to linux, they also seem to suffer from Ubuntuitis that disease that causes people to think that Ubuntu is Linux and Linux is Ubuntu as they dont seem to support much else.

EOR (End of Rant)

Hopefully the cheque from Nvidia is in the post :)

I used to get an odd lock up with nVidia drivers when running multiple monitors, the mouse pointer would bounce back and forth between one monitor and the other and the only way out was to do the skinny elephant thing. They seemed to have improved recently, as I don't get that problem and my system seems quite stable when running dual monitors.

A(nother) T(errible) I(nvesment)

I had made that decision before I had ever seriously considered linux. Helped a few friends with theirs and it left me swearing 'never again'. Have never seen any reason to change that opinion.

Ive been using Nvidia for about 6 years now without a hitch, currently on a dual monitor setup. I did have some odd issues about 2 years ago to do with monitor support ie monitors being incorrectly identified but at least their were simple workarounds available such as the UseEDID=false option to disable monitor detection and configure manually.

This simple workaround is not currently possible with the ATI fglrx driver and since every fglrx driver after version 10.5 incorrectly identifies one of my monitors it renders my ATI card useless, version 10.5 correctly identifies my monitors but suffers from a host of other problems such as no vsyncing and video lag, some users have gone to the extreme measure of cutting the hardwired link between the monitor & the PC that provides the EDID information which then allows you to supply a manual configuration.

It does run exceptionally well on my windows machine but it has left me with a bad taste in my mouth and i wont be buying or recommending ATI to others as I need my cards to be interchangeable between OS's.

> I used to get an odd lock up with nVidia drivers when running multiple monitors

The only problem I've ever had with the NVida drivers is an odd one. Sometimes when switching back and forth between my X display and a console screen, I'd lose everything. No video, no keyboard, no mouse. The machine was still functional, as it could be pinged and even ssh'ed into from another machine, but everything was dead as far as the console was concerned. Even killing X and restarting it (via aforementioned ssh session) wouldn't fix the problem. The machine would reboot fine with the power switch or a remote command, and everything would come back up. This would only happen about 1 time in 20 or so, but when you switch between X and a consol as much as I do, that was still too many.

I switched to the open source nv driver, and the problem went away.

Quoting:I switched to the open source nv driver, and the problem went away.

Hmm, not much joy there. No eye candy for you! On the other hand, the nouveau drivers are quite nice. They don't yet have all the 3D support that's in the nvidia blob, but they are much much snappier for normal 2D desktop work. I discovered this quite by accident when testing 10.04 beta, and decided to stick with the nouveau driver, not wanting to go back to the annoyingly sluggish 2D performance I was getting with the proprietary nvidia driver.

If the fglrx driver wasn't slower than the open-source ati driver, I'd be using it right now, turning off kernel mode setting in the boot line and going about my proverbial merry way.

But the proprietary fglrx IS slower, and the open driver won't cooperate with turning off KMS ... it's a standoff.

> No eye candy for you...

That's never been a very high priority for me. :)