I have not touched linux for a while. Now i wonder what the state of linux drivers is compared to the windows ones.
Looking in on it it seems that there are more then one way to it on linux. E.g. for ati you have the official closed source drivers (x86 only) and there are supposed to be complete opensource ones (suposedly also with 3d support). What is the state with vertex and pixel shaders on these opensource drivers?

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As far as I know the ati linux driver do support shader, but not all extensions. With a nvidia driver the situation is better, so all extensions are supported.
The opensource driver will don't have a 3D exceleration if you're not using very old carts.

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Now I am using a second computer with an ATI graphic card on it... so this is my current point of view on this topic.
Currently properitary driver are in fact the only real way to use OpenGL completly on a linux system. NVIDIA is working really hard to improve their drivers frequently. There are currently no known issue by my side, that something important is missing. So no lack of shaders or any important extension. The driver is quite solid and stable and should not contain any problems, you might not know from windows. ATI drivers are really a pain in the ash yet. There are quite some basic mistakes on my ATI card on the notebook and when loading their drivers, the x server crash often. If somebody is working on linux, he/she should really try to avoid ati drivers or should have some basic knowledge about system recovery. As far as I know the open source driver do missing shader support, but ... IMAO the radeon driver support does only go up to cards that even does not contain shaders. Bomb ATIs mailbox and claim for a better support for at least the closed drivers...

If you are not hot on the newest state of 3d technology you should give open drivers a try. Especially older ATI cards are currently well supported under linux (even with 3D support!). Because of this most of the 3D desktop screenshoots are based on older ati cards and their open "radeon" driver. However new cards are completly unsupported by the radeon driver and you are forced to run vesa or their closed drivers. NV is a solid driver for all nvidia cards currently avaible, however only if you need plain 2D drivers. Currently there is no really functional working free nvidia driver. However the improvements on "nouveau" had been quite impressive since the last year. FC7 will contain their 3d (accel) drivers as first mainstream distribution, others will follow. So I guess that these drivers will become a real alternative at the end of the year. Currently only some basic operations are avaible and their main target will to get beryl and compiz completly supported by open drivers.

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