Ever since upgrading to Fedora 8, months ago, I've had to run my work machine with the old Fedora 7 version of the xorg-x11-drv-ati video card driver, because the new version wouldn't work with dual-monitor + spanning. So I figured hey, maybe it's been fixed by now, let's try
Nope, still busted, just get desktop mirroring instead of spanning. The other downside of this open source driver is the terrible performance. I barely do anything graphically intensive, but there's webpages out there with hefty enough CSS/JS to drag the performance into the toilet
So I figured I'd give the official ATI driver a shot, first trying kmod-fglrx through livna repos, then ATI's installer off their website. Even though these resulted in far better performance, both caused terrible flakiness. The expirment ended after finally getting dual-monitors working on the ATI drivers, but finding that gnome-screensaver/xscreensaver would completely freeze the UI when run - i.e. if I locked my workstation or allowed it to idle long enough to launch the screensaver, it'd need a reboot. I couldn't even get the screensaver prefs to open without the app crashing
So, back to the Fedora 7 open-source driver crapfest, wishing for OS X
