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I've wasted an absurd amount of time trying to get my nVidia card to function properly in Linux (Ubuntu & Fedora). I've decided to purchase a new video card that will "just work" with any Linux I throw at it. Making things even easier, I'm not a gamer, though I do appreciate some of the 3D or alpha blending effects seen in modern GUIs.

What cards and/or manufacturers do you recommend for the maximum acceleration with minimum problems?

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I don't know what nVidia card you had or when you last tried an install. I fondly remember spending what seemed like years setting dotclocks etc. in the past. I've installed Karmic and Lucid in a vanilla PC with a 8800 GTS and spent zero time configuring. Indeed, my xorg.conf was auto-generated. Try a Live CD, you might be pleasantly surprised. – msw Jun 18 '10 at 7:51
I had no problems with my nVidia Quadro video card on my Ubuntu 10.04. The fonts are rendered larger than normal with the proprietary driver, but 3D and such work well. – petersohn Jun 18 '10 at 8:17
@msw - 9600GT, I've booted the Live CDs from both Fedora and Ubuntu. Both boot to a blank screen unless I force the VESA driver. Installing w/VESA then results in Nouveau for Fedora (doesn't work). The prop. ones do work, but then brake upon Fedora upgrades since Fedora doesn't control prop. repos. Basically it's a mess and I'm tired of wasting my time on it. – user3982 Jun 18 '10 at 8:25
Let me be clear: I'm 100% sure I could get my video card to work. In fact, it was working for a couple weeks w/a prop. driver before an automatic upgrade broke it. My point is that I don't WANT to spend time "getting it to work". I want to throw some money at the problem and make it go away forever. – user3982 Jun 18 '10 at 8:26
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@rrc7cz: kernel developers (and all linux users, really) would love you if you threw money at them to get the open source nvidia driver completed... – quack quixote Jun 18 '10 at 8:32
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radeon is getting fairly complete. Take a look at the radeon(4) man page for the supported cards.

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up vote 2 down vote

ATI Radeon is pretty good, I have a radeon 4890 and have had no problems getting advanced acceleration in ubuntu.

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