gfx-drivers & ACPI (comparing to Windows)

[nightfrost]

I have a laptop that during the last year or so has mainly been used as a platform to try out different distros and experimental stuff and such. Recently I thought I'd give it to my girlfriend, and so I made it a dual boot for her, since she allegedly needs some MS-only software. Now, two things really surprised me. 1) How well Windows could handle sleep and hibernate, 2) how well the r128-drivers worked.

So, it all made me rather curious. For starters, I have never ever managed to get sleep working - even remotely well - on that laptop under linux. The bios is not particularly buggy (IIRC, it gave two warnings at recompile, both of which were fixable). I really didn't expect Windows to manage to put it in suspend mode and bring it back that smoothly. Now, I'm wondering if this is just because ACPI implementation is rather new under Linux (implying that suspend on that laptop will work some day) or if there's something else to it? (Note: I didn't download any special suspend utilities from the manufacturer for Windows).

Secondly, the r128 drivers for Linux are released under GPL, if I'm not mistaken. And I know the quality of open source software normally is pretty high (hey, my OS of choice is completely open source ), so why does the linux driver lack 1) 24-bit color mode + DRI at the same time, and 2) tv-out (at least for the 2.6 kernel). I only thought of this because I've recently read about how it is often claimed, when people are (rightfully) complaining about ati's binary drivers, that if they would relase the drivers under GPL, the open source community would straighten them up. But, then, why aren't the r128-drivers fixed? The closed source windows drivers seem much more stable and perform better. My guess is that it imght be due to a lack of interest from the open source community to work on those drivers. After all, the card is pretty old... But I don't know, just curious...

I'd appreciate your thoughts on these things.