Someone asked on the boulder linux User Group mailing list today for recommendations for video cards.  He wanted to avoid nvidia.  One of the responses pointed out this very handy web site: 3D Graphics hardware performance using Free Software drivers (X.Org DRI).

I noticed just recently that my nvidia geforce 8200 based motherboard is not as stable with the latest updated for fedora 10.  The first symptom is that my wacom stops working and all brushes no longer function (even with the regular mouse) under gimp.  I exit from all applications and then try to logout of the desktop and the video just freezes.  The system is still running, fortunately, so I can ssh in from another box and reboot.  But this behaviour is both annoying and new – it wasn't happening before the latest f10 update.

Packages:

• xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-180.51-1.fc10.x86_64
• xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-180.51-1.fc10.x86_64
• kmod-nvidia-2.6.27.21-170.2.56.fc10.x86_64-180.51-1.fc10.1.x86_64

I used to be really happy with NVidia and then intel.  Now I'm not all that happy with any of them.  Despite the best intentions, stability on the desktop is starting to turn into the nightmare of the BSOD, sans the blue screen.  If it locks up, its broken.  It's that simple.  The interesting thing is that both NVidia and Intel now directly support those drivers.  So there's no blaming the open source hackers for this anymore.  It's your hardware – make it work.