So much hate for Intel right now

I've just come back from a reboot, because every single screen draw seemed like it was being done by an inbred bastard offspring of my first video card ever, a 2MB PCI vid card with an SiS chipset. Also, I noticed the status bars of my window manager were composed primarily of garbled shit (add to that the fact that my status bars are colored brown, and you get a complete picture).

In a previous post, I mentioned wanting to stick with an older, more stable version of the Intel video driver.

I never managed it.

To do so, I would've had to downgrade (or, worse, rebuild), aside from the driver, my X, and everything that accompanied it. I seriously do not have time for something like that, nor would I want to do it, even if I did.

I'm not sure if the garbled crap I was seeing is a bug in awesome (it looks like awesome's failing to clean up after itself, and ends up trying to draw on a dirty slate, as it is), but, at this point, I don't really care that much. Plus, I don't really want to talk about my window manager all that much, since I'm still pissed at the switch to Lua when awesome 3.x came out.

Right now, I'm just so very, very, very pissed off at Intel.

Back before this, I preferred Intel cards to anything else. They were relatively cheap, and often good enough for anything I wanted to do (I'm a code monkey by disposition, not a gamer; and I've got my Wii for games). Plus, and this was the most important bit for me, they've had free drivers from (I think) the beginning.

No mucking around with blobs of unknown quality, the way you had to do with nVidia cards (I still have nightmares about setting up dual-screen on that ghoddamned binary driver).

Nowadays, Intel's joined the shit-cards list for me. The desktop PC (a hand-me-down from my kid brother) in my room, with an ATI vid card, hasn't given me any grief at all whatsoever. Same with the workstation I had in a previous gig. Dual-screen was a relative cinch, and, once I had it set, I never had to worry about it (except when it died, and I had to replace it with an nVidia card).

If ever my GNU/Linux install gives me even half a reason to do so, I'm wiping my drives and putting FreeBSD on it, post-haste.