Comment by bayindirh

Yes, their open source drivers had a painful birth, but they are good once they're sanded and sharpened with the community.

However, they somehow managed to bork e1000e driver in a way that certain older cards sometimes fail to initialize and require a reboot. I have been bitten by the bug, and the problem was fixed later by reverting the problematic patch in Debian.

I don't know current state of the driver since I passed the system on. Besides a couple of bad patches in their VGA drivers, their cards are reliable and works well.

From my experience, their open source driver quality does not depend on the process, but on specific people and their knowledge and love for what they do.

I don't like the aggressive Intel which undercuts everyone by shady tactics, but I don't want them to wither and die, either, but seems like their process, frequency and performance "tricks" are biting them now.