[ltp] Re: What to take care of when buying a Lenovo? revisited

[Robert Tomsick]

On Fri, 2011-04-15 at 13:31 +0300, Micha Feigin wrote:
> On 14/04/11 18:59, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> >> Three years have passed since you said this, does your advice still
> >> stand?
> >
> > I can't speak for him, but with regards to politics, the situation
> > hasn't changed w.r.t nVidia which is still completely uncooperative.
> > ATI/AMD on the other hand is now very cooperative for its GPUs (not sure
> > how it compares to Intel nowadays, but judging from the quality of the
> > drivers it seems to be in the same ballpark).
> >
> > I don't know if the situation in terms of power usage has changed much.
> > Based on technical specs of recent AMD and NVidia chipsets for
> > nettop-level systems, it seems like the difference between Intel and
> > AMD/NVidia has been reduced, but practice tends to be very different
> > from theory (especially when you add a Free Software requirement into
> > the mix), so don't take my word for it.
> >
> >> Has the situation improved with nVidia drivers?
> >
> > There are now 2D Free Software drivers for most NVidia chipsets and they
> > work OK.  But this is *despite* NVidia rather than thanks to them, so
> > it's now on par with AMD/Intel's support and progresses slower.
> >
> >> If one were to buy an T420s today and had to choose between  Intel® HD
> >> 3000 and NVIDIA® Quadro® NVS4200M, which one is the one to get? Is
> >> there a chance nVidia drivers will improve to a point in the next
> >> three years that it will be worthwhile to have an nVidia optimus card
> >> running under Linux? And lastly, is there any harm in getting the
> >> laptop with the nVidia chip and disabling it for the time being if the
> >> price of the two T420s is nearly the same?
> >
> > I'd recommend you vote with your wallet and stay away from NVidia.
> >
> 
> Although my experience is that the NVIDIA closed source drivers are much better 
> than the ATI ones, so it's also a question of whether you insist on open source 
> drivers, which are 2D only for NVIDIA, or are willing to work with the 
> proprietary ones.

Unless I'm mistaken, noveau does support 3D, although the support is
very much a work in progress.  I know it can support compositing WMs and
some games, and I know it's good enough to give me pretty shadows and
translucency, etc. on my desktop.