When the graphics card in the computer I mainly use at home broke down a while ago I went to a computer shop downtown and bought me a new one. Since the computer is a few years old it has a AGP interface, and not the newer PCI express, which meant that the shop didn’t have such a big selection of cards, they more or less only had one at home, of the ATI brand. I already had a card of said brand, an older model, in one of my other computers, where it had worked fine under Linux.

I ran into problems at once, however, the new card did not work with the standard driver in Debian, and at the time it was not supported by the official driver from ATI either, so I had to make use of a backwards compatible and very old default driver, which is so slow that it is impossible to watch an animation properly.

Support for the card did, however, arrive in the official ATI driver some time later, but it functioned very badly. The computer, which used to bee very stable, froze or hanged several times a day. Updating the kernel, the driver or the entire Debian distribution to a newer version hasn’t helped, and ATI’s customer service doesn’t feel like helping me.

From: ATI - Customer Care
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 16:11:14 -0400
Subject: Ticket #737-1107444 (Linux driver crashes/hangs computer on X.org 7.0.22)

The Linux drivers available from ATI are provide are as is. You may be able to get further assistance from the Linux community at the links below:

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Now I have got my hands on a used Nvidia card. I have always had good experiences with Nvidia cards and Linux, so in the future I will probably stick to buying their cards.