ATI driver on Linux.. which one to use?

Question

How should I say.. I know my way in Linux. I've been using Linux/BSD for a very long time. The problem is the ATI driver. I want to install OpenSUSE on my laptop (too much free time? :)).

But. WHICH Ati driver should I use?
First there was an open-source (xf86-ati ?) and the prop ATI one. Okay. Then RadeonHD showed up. First, it was the messiah for all the ATI users. Recently I read that even OpenSUSE, a main character in this driver abandoned it.

The proprietary driver suc.. cough is bad. That's alright. But which open-source driver should I use?

The hardware is an ATI mRadeon HD3650. (In my case. But basically all the 3000+ Radeons. As far as I remember the main ATI driver won't support it. On Windows, it does. But even the Windows driver is a piece of.. crap.)
(Not sure if I should convert this to community wiki or not. If yes, please comment.)

Answer 1

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/radeon seems to have the lowdown:

Radeon has some features not available in radeonhd and vice versa, but generally they are starting to be quite close while radeon supports all the cards and radeonhd only r5xx-r7xx.

I believe that the radeon driver now has the same or better support as radeonhd. The "ATI Hardware" section of the "openSUSE Graphic Card Practical Theory Guide for Users" seems to concur:

As of openSUSE-11.3 Milestone6 Novell/SuSE-GmbH have announced this driver superseded by the radeon driver, so it is possible the radeon driver may function better on RadeonHD hardware than the radeonhd.

I am not an OpenSUSE user, but the radeon driver seems to be contained in the xorg-x11-driver-video package, while radeonhd is provided by xorg-x11-driver-video-radeonhd.

Answer 2

I'm using the radeon driver of X.org on my system (Fedora 12, ATI HD 4000 Series). It works well for me.

Answer 3

radeonhd is dead, as other posters have mentioned.

The free radeon driver is actually a bundle of drivers, and it should autodetect which driver is needed for your card.