But the thing that stays in my mind is that it's not like something's not working on all distros - it's as if some parts of the system don't always load up correctly. A few hours ago slitaz hanged on boot while setting up the hardware abstraction layer - nothing serious, a restart fixed it and I never saw it again, but doesn't this prove that many things just happen randomly? I mean, half of the time (and especially on my own custom setups like arch or ubuntu minimal) I have no lag related to the graphics card. But it just happens at random. How come it's working? Maybe there's just too much stuff going on on the kernel during booting, too many conflicting drivers or something?
One more thing. On minimal, custom desktops I usually install everything needed - xorg, ati radeon drivers, mesa dri packages and while the menus don't lag anymore, 3D apps (games) run at barely 10 fps. Whereas Linux Mint lxde (just an example) runs openarena flawlessly.
There must be a way to fix this... Maybe it's something related to dri modules loading incorrectly? Would building my own kernel fix it? Any other suggestions?
If the linux kernel is not as forgiving as windows for errors, then does it sometimes work without graphics card lag? Strange.