I think the real issue is that Nvidia is the most closed when it comes to releasing specs. With the proper specs, open source developers will produce better drivers than Nvidia.

> With the proper specs, open source developers will produce better drivers than Nvidia.

That may be true for specific features like Optimus--I can't say. But if you're talking about writing a full 3D driver stack for a modern GPU, you're almost certainly underestimating the effort involved by several orders of magnitude. NVIDIA has hundreds of full-time software engineers working on the various parts of the GPU driver stack. Now imagine doing it without the immense institutional knowledge.

Nobody disputes that nVidia's drivers (and hardware) excel at pushing textured triangles, but that particular measurement is fairly high up Maslow's Hierarchy of Video Driver Needs. As I understand it, people generally want nVidia drivers to be open source so they can add solid support for things like XRandR (instead of stupid TwinView), reliable suspend/resume, kernel mode-setting, that kind of stuff.

Furthermore, the woman who posed the question indicated that she knew the Optimus drivers were going to be troublesome for linux. Why would you try to combine two technologies that you know are troublesome to get working together and then complain about it?

Historically, the Nvidia proprietary drivers have sucked less than ATI/AMD's. I had had a not-so-horrible experience with them on my previous laptop. To be fair, I've also had a not-awful experience with AMD's OpenGL drivers, too.

Now try to find a laptop with a discrete Nvidia GPU that doesn't have this Optimus junk and you'll see the problem.