No, not true - you can certainly use Optimus cards on Linux, you just have to choose between the integrated chipset or the dedicated chipset at boot time. What you don't get is the power savings from being able to dynamically switch between the low-power integrated Intel gfx and the high performance NVidia gfx. It's really not that big of a deal - the battery life on my thinkpad is just fine using the NVidia gfx 100% of the time.

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NVIDIA has been providing stable, fast, feature complete drivers for years and have supported Linux and FreeBSD just as well as they support Windows.

ATI, on the other hand, released specs years ago and the open source drivers are still unstable, slow, and incredibly buggy. The Intel drivers seem a little more stable than ATI, but they're still ridiculously slow and not feature complete.

I develop 3d software on Linux (and OSX, Windows) for a living and I test NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel gfx hardware on a regular basis. The NVIDIA closed source driver is the only linux 3d driver that is acceptable for doing real work. Period. It'd be great if the open alternatives were decent, but they're not.

Too true - although I'm of the opinion that if SGI had ported their IRIX tools to Linux earlier and remained a *NIX company, they may have had a gentler fall to obsolescence and perhaps even survived as a relevant company. The abrupt switch to a commodity software platform and relying on hardware as a differentiator was horribly misguided. No one was going to pay $5,000 for an SGI machine when they could buy a $2500 Dell that ran the exact same software. By the time SGI tried to embrace Linux, it was far too late...

I think Nokia abandoning Qt is the real issue here. If they were going to maintain their own mobile development platform that ran on Windows Mobile, Symbian and MeeGo - that /could/ have been a winning strategy.

Qt has been modular since ver 4, so you don't have to include the GUI components if you don't want to. The API is clean, elegant and consistent, plus the documentation is great. I don't have anything bad to say about ACE or Boost - they're both high quality toolkits - but if I had to choose just one toolkit to use for the rest of my life, it'd be Qt, hands down.

Why would a company need to market their products if they had a monopoly? Marketing budgets typically go up when competition increases.