To anyone not familiar with this, jlgreco is referring to open-source drivers - both AMD and nVidia provide closed-source driver binaries that tend to outperform their open-source counterparts.

nVidia and AMD's closed-source drivers have advanced noticeably since Valve released the Steam for Linux client.

Only for values of "outperform" which are selective in which frame rates they measure, and take absolutely no account of power consumption on laptops.

I wish it weren't so, and it's nobody's fault but the vendors', but the open source drivers are not clearly better in every way

You misread his comment, the closed source drivers outperform.

The advantage of the open source drivers is they are hassle free. They never piss you off by finding new and creative ways to wreck your system and leave you in a bind. For I suspect most linux users, that is the most important factor, not squeezing every last FPS out of your GPU and every last minute out of your battery.

Intel GPU really is the way to go for linux though. No hassle and more or less the sort of performance you would expect from the same chip on other OSes: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_snb...

I agree. I've been using NVidia hardware for the better part of the last decade and switched to Intel HD4000 graphics sometime last year. The experience is really refreshing. Stuff works and I don't have to screw around with the binary drivers. The performance is also acceptable for light gaming. It is definately much slower than the GTX NVidia card I have in my big bulky box that's gathering dust but it fits comfortably in the laptop without making it a cooking oven.

For the past 12 years, the only thing I've had to do to get the nVidia driver working again after an upgrade was a reboot. It doesn't wreck the system and it still works better than its AMD/ATi counterparts.

At least nouveau is not yet feature-complete. For example, it cannot handle multiple screens, which means you cannot attach a beamer to your laptop.

Nouveau (the reverse engineered Nvidia drivers) only work on some of the systems for some of the users some of the time(1). It is an incredible amount of work, and an incredible amount of functionality that they have. And they are constantly chasing advances in Nvidia's hardware, as well as progression in the Linux desktop world.

As an example of Nouveau not working "fully" - I get pointer trails, incomplete drawing, no vsync, monitor not doing DPMS power down and several other glitches. As a third monitor this is okay, but it wouldn't work for a primary.

Nvidia's binary drivers are generally very good providing you only want what they provide. For example it was only very recently (as in months) that they started supporting xrandr 1.4 and even then it doesn't play nicely with others.

(1) The Nouveau folks don't claim any different, and "some" does often turn out to be "a lot"