The control panel works well... until it suddenly doesn't (which has happened at least twice on my Ubuntu 10.10 install).

And in 9.04 I had to keep a piece of paper with the commands to reinstall the closed-source NVidia drivers every time the kernel got patched. Apparently I shouldn't have needed to do this, and yet every single update for months would drop me back to the shell after X failed to start.

When I was younger I'd have tried to work out what was wrong. Now I just sigh and are grateful I wrote down the package I needed, and the flag to get it to work from a non-X environment.

But yes, your point is noted.

AMD drivers are much improved now. In fact these days I prefer them to Nvidia since doing screen specific color correction is a breeze.

In my experience this is not the case. I am using the new AMD drivers (I belive) on Ubuntu 11.04 and the performance is terrible. Alt-tabbing to switch between windows even incurs a second+ delay. I reverted back to the open source one and it at least functions.

I had this problem until I disabled vertical refresh. Based on posts in the ubuntu forums this appears to solve most people's problems with the AMD drivers.

I think 11.04 is just slow. I installed this on my nvidia ion-based desktop (that I use for watching TV, etc.), and it's much slower than the previous revision. Everything is glacial. I think I'm just going to replace Ubuntu with my Usual Setup (Debian), because all I do is run wget and mplayer anyway.

Good to know.