And my experience has been just the opposite Clayton. The NVidia cards have been a nightmare for me
This is cannot understand... no really I can't, at least not in the last... say... 1 or 2 years.... since SUSE has been providing the nVidia driver in YOU. Setting up an nVdida card for basic use (ie single monitor with 3GL enabled) has been a no brainer on install. I have done it dozens of times on dozens of machines. In contrast, ATI has been a total nightmare. We used to use ATI where I work - a 100% Linux company. Not one of the developers was able to get the ATI card to set up correctly. We are not talking a bunch of Linux newbies here... this is a team of highly skilled developers that know their Linux inside and out. One lucky guy in the team got an nVidia card by mistake (IT dept ordered it instead of ATI for some reason). He fired up his new computer and installed Linux... and was up and running within a hour from a bare machine. Meanwhile the rest of us poor sods with ATI were still figting the broken ATI installer, wading our way though crap documentation from ATI.. swearing a lot. We finally did get the ATI machines working, but only barely, and they are so fragile it is ridiculous. Every time you make the slightest change to the system.. bam, you're down to run level 3 until you figure out why the video has broken. Everyone finally got so fed up with the ATI cards they were all tossed in the trash and nVidias were installed. 2 minutes after boot, all systems were up and running with full 3GL and no video problems at all anymore. I honestly have yet to see (personally) a single case of an ATI card actually working correctly in Linux (and this is over 8 years of full time Linux use and support).
doubt there has been a single nVidia card user or very few that hasn't had to get help on the suse-e list.
This may be true from 3 years or more ago, but now...?? It's a rare person with problems with nVidia. C.