Ahh, another thread of people saying that AMD's proprietary driver is bad, without giving a single reason as to why. It sort of reminds me of circular wikipedia references.
Ok, I read the article (again). The only thing of any substance said about fglrx is that there's currently no xserver 1.7 support. Anything said about AMD's plans for xserver 1.8 are pure speculation (or did I miss something?).
I have not known AMD to support anything that's in RC status, or anything before it's released actually, but then that's in line for what is continuously stated as the target for fglrx (workstation markets). This may also be a reason drivers from AMD aren't labelled as beta.
So, people wanting support for something still in RC stages, well hey I can understand that one - but that has nothing to do with quality of the drivers themselves.
Hell, I use fglrx every day and I like it. Use a distro which is supported and everything works quite fine.
I really can't see the problems with the driver. Once the 2d optimizations is done, it is almost perfect for my needs.
Seriously, I didn't think it would need explanations. I'll just say that having to put up with tearing while viewing videos with a `modern` video card is absolutely ridiculous.
The straw that broke the camel's back was the X11 crash which happened while I was typing in Pidgin with World of Warcraft in windowed mode in the background.
It doesn't need anymore explanations. The explanations are all out there, in this forum, in other forums, in ATI's unofficial bugtracker. Something the fanboys apparently choose to ignore. I can understand why bridgman defends the company he works for. But this fanboy behavior from people with no ties to ATI, I've never quite understood that.
I'm assuming you're referring to tearing while using xv. I believe the normal response from AMD is to use the opengl renderer instead, and enable vsync. This is one issue I have with fglrx too though - screen splitting with xv.
As for the straw, that could just as easily be wine having issues. I'm not saying it couldn't be fglrx, just that more info would be required.