James Bottomley has posted an essay on graphics drivers on the Linux Foundation site. "For Linux, the best way of demonstrating user satisfaction objectively is with the kerneloops project, which tracks reported problems with various kernels (an oops is something that's equivalent to a panic on Unix or blue screen on windows). For instance looking at the recently released 2.6.25 kernel one can see that both the binary Nvidia driver and binary ATI firegl driver account for positions in the top 15 oopses. If one follows the history, one finds that the binary drivers are always significant contributors to this list, whereas open source drivers appear and disappear (corresponding to people actually seeing the bugs and fixing them). This provides objective support for a significant kernel developer contention that it's harder to get fixes for binary drivers. The other bright spot is that the Intel graphics drivers rarely figure at all in the list also showing that if you want graphics to 'just work' then Intel is the one to choose."
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