Okay, let's try this one more time.

nvidia (the blob from nVidia) is superior in terms of features and stability. It still crashes all the time, is buggy, doesn't support esoteric X features correctly, etc.

XvBA is dead in the water, as far as desktop support is concerned. AMD crafted it for enterprise clients, not desktop clients. You all will have to wait until somebody introduces VDPAU for Radeons in the open-source driver, which brings me to...

...Contribution. The open-source driver is completely fueled by contributions. We have the documentation, we have the expertise. We only lack manpower. If you want drivers so damn bad, why not contribute? I learned how to write graphics drivers out of pure hatred for fglrx; if I can do it, surely you all can too.

Finally, fglrx is for FireGLs first, Radeons second. It's an enterprise driver, for enterprise Linux. The big targets here are SUSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu LTS; not Gentoo, Arch, or name-your-distro-here.

tl;dr: Read the post and stop relying on tl;dr.

~ C.