~~~
kijin
I assume you're talking about NVIDIA's proprietary drivers.
While it's true that some manufacturers offer drivers for their hardware with
different capabilities from the ones bundled with the kernel, the Linux
kernel's graphics drivers are generally OK for average users. It would be
wonderful if manufacturers would provide optimized firmware with their
hardware, and it would be even better if they would provide a source code
version of it with the hardware. But for that to happen, the hardware makers
would have to start trusting the open-source software developers to respect
their IP, which is not happening so far. It's up to us, the community, to
keep innovating and keep improving the drivers. If you want to use a
proprietary graphics driver, great. Use one that doesn't suck.
lucb1e
You seem to be missing my point. Yes, the proprietary drivers are fine for
most users. But if you want to install proprietary drivers, I'd recommend
Ubuntu over Arch (at least on this laptop), as there are much more ready-to-
use ones. (The proprietary drivers are called "nvidia" here, whereas the open
ones are called "nouveau".)
In my experience, even if the proprietary drivers work, they fail and the
kernel fails with error messages like the one here. They also fail to launch
Steam games (despite Steam having a solution for that). I think Nvidia could
make the proprietary drivers better by having the proprietary server
independent of the proprietary client.
If you're going to use proprietary drivers, great. But then I'd recommend
Ubuntu for most users.
I'm talking about the open-source drivers. I'm fine with people using
proprietary drivers, but they are definitely not open-source.
I'm not sure if they are supposed to fail and crash in cases where you don't
have Steam, though.
Anyway, when it comes to Steam, your mileage may vary. I haven't had issues
with Steam on proprietary drivers, but then I've never used AMD hardware
either.
I just don't see why proprietary graphics drivers are so much better. They
just push the burden to the user to find a compatible driver and to install
it. Open source graphics drivers are extremely simple to install and
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