Jayne's husband Ian is a Linux enthusiast and he will be adding more Linux content here over time but here's some desktop info for now.

Video Drivers/Desktop

If you are not using 3D effects then just about any video card and any open source driver will work for you.

For 3D dekstop graphics you need to enable Compiz Fusion. This was originally called Compiz, got forked to Beryl and has now been remerged.

The best video hardware with open source support is Intel without a doubt as they provide all open source drivers. Their performance isn't always the best though.

ATI and Nvidia provide closed source drivers which work but there are disadvantages (e.g. only run on Intel, may not work on latest X, do not support old or brand new cards).

There is an open source project Noveau trying to write Nvidia drivers.

Avivo is trying to do the same for ATI/AMD cards.

An excellent place to keep track of open source video card development is Phoronix.

Distributions

We recommend Ubuntu for most users. Fedora is also a great distro. Damn Small Linux (DSL) is useful for old machines.