An anonymous reader writes:
Since being bought by AMD in 2006, we were promised improved Linux drivers for ATI video cards. Recently AMD released a second batch of information on their hardware to the open source community, which helps to feed into the radeonhd driver, but their closed source proprietary driver still remains, well, closed. The driver has always been second rate, but now it has gotten to the point that ArchLinux developers have decided to dump it all together. Developer Eduardo Romero writes: "The ATI Catalyst drivers are in a pitiful state and AMD is doing close to nothing to improve the situation, they just take Linux as a joke. At least, that is the impression one gets when NVIDIA releases great drivers for Linux." He and Andreas Radke have decided to drop the driver out of the supported package trees and have pushed it back onto the community to maintain. They are instead going to concentrate on the free and open source radeonhd driver: "The radeonhd driver, which is in extra, shows some promise." After many years, the battle for open source graphics drivers is still ongoing.