I may finally have enough reason to leave AMD for good

[FlyingMongoose]

And this is the reason:
http://hexus.net/business/news/corporate...-will-buy/

See I've been toying moving to Nvidia for some time now, primarily due to the fact that Nvidia has far better linux support, and Windows really does become software as a service (like they've done with office 365), then there's little keeping me tied to Windows except games. While ever since AMD bought ATI the linux drivers for AMD GPU's have been getting slightly better (extremely slowly) the possibility of Microsoft buying them means a high likeliness of just "throwing out" the linux code.

So... I may finally get myself an Nvidia card for the very first time since the TNT 2 series (yeah, it's been that long because I keep seeing the same issues pop up time and time again in not only that, but successive series too amongst my friends).

[CaffeinePowered]

But if you roll two turds together it just might make gold right?

[FlyingMongoose]

So here's what I think needs to happen if Microsoft buys AMD:
While I expect them to throw Linux support out entirely for more adopters to support and purchase the products (and yes I know *nix is a tiny market share).

Microsoft/AMD Scraps existing Linux FireGL and moves to OpenGL based Linux drivers allowing it to be properly implemented and truly open source.

The source/libraries/compilers in order to develop for these things need to be open source and easily accessible to Visual Studio Community Editions (2013-2015 are already a step in the right direction now supporting way more than Visual Studio has supported in years).

Visual Studio needs to be made available to be ran NATIVELY on Linux.

In other words. I don't expect it too be a very fruitful for the consumer as I highly doubt any of these things will actually happen (hell when AMD bought ATI people thought they were going to do the FireGL->OpenGL move, and they didn't.

Still, as was pointed out, AMD basically needs the R&D money, and Microsoft has it.