I'm having a really hard time understanding what it is your saying here
although I think you are upset with the response. Hopefully this will be more
helpful.
Here is the status of each of the major players producing a graphics chipset:
Intel: Intel has done an excellent job of supporting free software within the
graphics department. The only non-free chipset that is marketed as Intel that
is not free was developed by a third part. However Intel has not done a good
job of supporting coreboot (a free BIOS project).
AMD: AMD refuses to cooperate on free drivers. They release insufficient
source code / documenation to create a free software friendly driver. The way
I like to describe it is they have released the source code for a driver
which acts as a wrapper around a proprietary component. This is unacceptable
to free software users. You won't get support for AMD's ATI graphics chipsets
here as there is no free driver.
nVidia: We don't like nVidia either as the company has expressly stated they
will not support a free software driver. You might even say the company
actively works against free software. Despite this there is the nouveau
project. This project has done the near impossible and been reverse
engineering the chipset(s) in order to produce a free software graphics
driver. The problem is that by the time you end up with decent support for a
particular generation chipset the chipset is old and may not be much if at
all better than a lower end chipset from Intel. For this reason it is better
for users to simply go with an Intel graphics chipset on a newer system. If
you are looking to upgrade just the graphics card of an older system there is
not a way to do that using a non-nVidia based graphics card and still have
support for free software. Intel is also got advantages over nVidia in some
areas. Video for instance is better supported by Intel. Comparatively the
9500GT that we sell is only competitive to newer Intel graphics chipsets.
Does it make sense to get a 5 year old nVidia graphics chipset on a new
computer? It's only slightly better in some instances (like for certain
games).
Long story short your best bet is to avoid AMD in the future and get an
nVidia graphics card when your finances allow or replace the motherboard and
CPU with a newer model and use the CPU integrated Intel graphics chipset. The
nVidia 9500GT that we sell at libre.ThinkPenguin.com is well supported by
nouveau if you prefer to upgrade just the graphics card. Until you do one of
these things the free software community can't help you. If you want help
with GNU/Linux and don't want to follow the free software principles there
are many other distributions you can go with.
Ultimately this is an ethical issue that you as a user have to decide on.
Nobody here is trying to be mean or to force your hand.
There is more information about free software at the free software
foundation's web site:
http://www.fsf.org/
There are many technical and ethical reasons regardless of your perspective
(well, free software or "open source") why you should avoid digital
restrictions and non-free software.
