Do you prefer the free radeon graphics driver or the proprietary fglrx driver?

[Asatru9]

I prefer the non proprietary drivers whenever possible.

[Gster4]

I prefer the radeon driver over fglrx's weird quirks. radeon works well enough for me

[Mists]

I am currently using the beta proprietary fglrx driver and it is working great.

[pme 72]

I used fglrx with Hardy to activate desktop effects and to play SuperTuxKart. Briefly had it running on Karmic to try Second Life and it seemed to work well. When Resume from Suspend stopped working after a kernel update I enabled it in Lucid but went back to Radeon after the next update. I have only bought entry level, low powered cards and like how trouble free they have been with Radeon.

[oscarivera9]

Neither. nVidia proprietary drivers

But I don't have a Nvidia graphics card which is why I didn't even mention Nvidia as a choice. Ultimately I am using this thread/survey in addition to some research I've done to make a decision as to whether I'll stick with the Radeon driver or switch to the fglrx (proprietary) driver.

[oscarivera9]

After keeping this survey open for a week to find out what the general consensus is regarding (yet once again) free vs. proprietary drivers, it seems like the community is pretty much split down the middle.
Since right now I'm doing fine with the Radeon driver, I will wait until Steam is officially released to make my decision.

[iamkuriouspurpleoranj]

I'm not a gamer but I did download Steam a month or two ago and play that free game in the old fort. My experience was that with fglrx on a mid range Sony from 2 years ago, it was sub console standard. It was ok, but there were some weird glitches and distortion. That was on Manjaro though if it makes a difference.

[kaldor]

If you are going to be doing any gaming at all then FGLRX is a must. Sadly, using FGLRX comes at the cost of stability and weird quirks (I never managed to fix my tearing and lag issues). For anything else, the free driver should suffice.

[oscarivera9]

If you are going to be doing any gaming at all then FGLRX is a must. Sadly, using FGLRX comes at the cost of stability and weird quirks (I never managed to fix my tearing and lag issues). For anything else, the free driver should suffice.

Yes, you see that's precisely it, you hit it right no the spot. In the past I've had weird experiences with fglrx whereas radeon has always worked well. Needless to say, for the last couple of years I've been using radeon. However, now that Steam is officially available for Ubuntu and new games are being ported on a regular basis, I can avoid having to reboot in order to play games. Steam suggests that I use the fglrx driver, which is why I'm debating what to do.