PA on Linux kinda sucks

It's not problem for gaming hardware. You usually buy new card before NVidia drop kernel support for your old card. Nvidia 325.08 driver still support GeForce 8 series card which I used from 2007 to 2011.

Also Nvidia legacy drivers are much better than AMD legacy drivers. I even able to run Debian 5 with Nvidia Vanta from 1998 (or 1999?), some effects like transparency worked on it! It's was 2011 year.

Yeah, distro in signature, but actually I tested it on multiple different distros and DE.

PS: I actually love open source drivers and my next video card will be from AMD too, but for non enthusiasts who want to play games Nvidia still better.

My oldest card still in use is an ATI 9800 (r300) from 2002. It runs quite nicely using the open source drivers, which are still being developed, though not as actively as drivers for more recent cards. In fact, they have been converting it to work properly with Gallium 3D too. But as you said, for ordinary gamers, this isn't really that much of a concern.

As for the distro, I know that Kubuntu doesn't get nearly as much love as Ubuntu does, but even still, KDE tends to work with games very well. And I'm pretty sure it's a distro issue, as I'm using a very similar video card (HD 6870) with the latest proprietary drivers.
(Using Slackware 14.0, Fluxbox WM, but I've tested on KDE too, which is also installed.)

Don't think so. I tested it with Unity, Gnome 2 and on Debian 6, same story.

ITYM the classic Mesa backend vs the Gallium Mesa backend. Mesa still exists and provides the client libraries for GL and soon to be CL. Whats changing is its now a universal framework to do the entire HAL in the kernel instead of per-hardware userland code.

Intel has adopted Gallium, and they have 2 or 3 developers on staff working on various Gallium related tasks (not all explicitly for Intel hardware).

Everything before r600 is almost feature complete in radeon.

And for the record, Ubuntu and Kubuntu are both the same distro, the only difference is the default desktop installed. I have no clue why they do this, no other distro does.

Thats a bit of FUD there.

Wayland is a server protocol. Fedora is going to be using Weston, the reference implementation, by default in the next release or the release after, and Ubuntu is going to be shipping Mir (a Unity-specific Wayland display server) by default sometime soon.

Also, LTS is an Ubuntu term. No other distro does this because its a support nightmare and is not particularly useful. If I wanted out of date software, I'd dig out a 486 and install some ancient version of Slackware on it.

Yeah, the Mesa backend is called Mesa 3D, which is a part of the Mesa libraries. (The joy of nomenclature.) But pretty much what you said.

Also, I wasn't sure how far along Intel was with their work on it, it seems like they're making better headway than I thought.

I know the pre-r600 stuff is nearly feature complete in Mesa 3D, but last I checked, they only started rolling out Gallium support. It doesn't matter as much from a usability perspective, but it will eventually result in a slimmer library if they can ditch the old Mesa 3D component.

And the reason I make the differentiation between Ubuntu and Kubuntu is that since Kubuntu gets less love from the main development group, they've had issues in the past getting it to run as smoothly. Perhaps they've overcome that obstacle nowadays.

In any case, the reason for the split is that if both were included, the distro wouldn't fit on a single CD. Early on, Canonical decided that supporting a single DE would allow them to focus more on the quality of that DE, and they chose it to be Gnome. Thus, all the other DEs got their own derivative Ubuntu distros, with their own support teams.

And LTS IS important for Ubuntu. Cause their track record of stability per release certainly isn't as sterling as Debian or Slackware. :lol: