Ubuntu Drops Support For AMD's Catalyst GPU Driver (phoronix.com) 155
An anonymous reader writes: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and newer will no longer be supporting AMD's widely-used Catalyst Linux (fglrx) driver. AMD has dropped support for this proprietary AMD driver in favor of encouraging users to use the open-source AMDGPU/Radeon drivers. While the fglrx/Catalyst driver is notorious among Linux gamers, this will represent a regression for many AMD Linux users due to the open-source driver only having OpenGL 4.1 support compared to OpenGL 4.5 in Catalyst, lower performance in common gaming workloads, incomplete OpenCL compute support, no CrossFire multi-GPU support, and other missing features. Much of the missing functionality will end up being implemented by AMD's new AMDGPU driver stack but that is still months away from being truly ready and will only benefit the very latest Radeon GPUs while the fglrx-free Ubuntu 16.04 is set to ship in April.
A little pain for a lot of gain (Score:5, Interesting)
That is what this really boils down to.
Re:A little pain for a lot of gain (Score:5, Insightful)
nope, the open source drivers are garbage, people will install the binaries from the vendor themselves
Re:A little pain for a lot of gain (Score:4)
wrong. people need a working video system to do serious work too. if the open source driver can't do the job they aren't going to throw away their card nor should they. The reality of the world isn't as beautiful as the followers of Stallman imagine. I don't play games and I use nvdidia binaries on my Linux Mint system. I'm not throwing away the used computer I bought on ebay because of "open source purity"
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Have you tried the nouveau drivers recently? I replaced some legacy nvidia drivers with the open source ones, and was pleasantly surprised.
As long as reclocking your card is supported [freedesktop.org], you should give it a try.
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yes, they sucked. my machine froze repeatedly. guess that's almost like your experience, I sure was surprised.
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People should define the video card by what works with their software, not the other way around.
That said, it's frustrating how poor the opensource drivers have been over the years. Even more so when the closed source ones don't support older devices. (I run a 4-head quadro rig. Nivida stopped supporting the cards in their driver 4 years ago.)
Re:A little pain for a lot of gain (Score:5, Insightful)
People run Linux for a variety of reasons, most of which aren't directly that the software is open source. If you want wide adoption of Linux, or a particular distribution, you have to cater to a wide range of users with a wide range of wands and needs. It's great that you're passionate about open source, but not everyone is that way, nor do they need to be. If you want people to use open source software, you have to satisfy many needs in the process. Sometimes that means being pragmatic and accept that a closed source solution is the best choice until a suitable open source solution is available. That people want their computer to be usable for their needs isn't stupid at all. I run Linux on several of my computers and I have many reasons, but open source is pretty far down on the list. I value that I don't have to pay for a lot of the software that I use, but I'm willing to donate to a few projects in return. I value the relative security, stability, and privacy afforded by running Linux. Some of the software I use for my job requires that I run Linux or a similar system. Some of these tools for visualizing meteorological data require a fair amount of video horsepower, so I certainly value any performance boost from the video driver. If all things are equal or pretty close to equal, I prefer an open source solution over a closed source solution. But it's pretty far down on my list of priorities. It doesn't mean that my needs are stupid at all, despite what you say.
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AC poster here.
I'm not saying everybody should go open source or die.
If you want to play games, the open source driver is not there yet. If you run OpenCL, it's not there yet. Those are obvious statements.
But for many other tasks it might be good enough. Me, I can live without games. I have a 1GB no fan card, which is good enough for me. Your threshold might be different than mine. I can understand that.
Lastly, if you value your privacy, you might want to give up some things. However if nobody gives a damn
Re:A little pain for a lot of gain (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh boo hoo, someone likes something that I don't. Perhaps people like having systems that actually work? Furthermore, how many people actually care if the video driver is open source? I know that I've never looked at the source for a video driver, and have no interest in doing so. Therefore, it makes no difference to me (and plenty of people like me) if it is closed source or open. I'd rather play the game then sit there and audit code.
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You understood the message, so it doesn't matter. And when I do play with source code, it is normally at night after I've finished gaming anyway (I worked with porting libreSSL to AIX and IRIX for a while there, plus some small projects of my own). So there are rare occasions that my statement becomes true. To date though, I've never sifted through the code for a video driver.
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No, no. See, that's just the order in which he prefers to perform those tasks. First, he plays a game. After that, he winds down with a code audit, provided, of course, that it isn't video driver code.
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in other words: I don't give a damn about my freedom, just let me play my stupid game.
Kind of, but don't be so melodramatic, in reality it is:
"I don't give a damn about my freedom to modify my graphics driver, just let me use my computer to play games and run applications "
And yes this is true of the vast majority of computer users.
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in other words: I don't give a damn about my freedom, just let me play my stupid game.
Or they need openCL for number crunching, and the FOSS drivers do not have that. But people outside of your use case are obviously all idiots anyway, so why worry...
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You can thank the kernel developers.
You got it backwards...
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Pretty hard when it is AMD that is dropping support for the binary.
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nope, the open source drivers are garbage, ....
Well, it's Open Source, so help fix it. Or so the lore says...
Re:Not completely correct. (Score:4, Interesting)
yeah if you use the proprietary nvidia drivers it works great. too bad the open source one sucks. I wished I lived in the world where everything was open source, even the firmware in my disk drives and bios and usb devices......but we don't live in that world
Re:Not completely correct. (Score:5, Insightful)
yeah if you use the proprietary nvidia drivers it works great. too bad the open source one sucks.
Do you really think any significant portion of gamers and other end users care about that? They want their systems to work well, they don't want to be writing driver code and recompiling hardware drivers.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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So stop saying you care about the four freedoms and just admit the community only cares about free as in beer because that is EXACTLY what we are talking about here.
Whoa there cowboy, I think you replied to the wrong post, or didn't read properly. I didn't ever say I care about the four freedoms, in fact I pointed out that most people - me included - are quite content with whatever works the best, be it proprietary or free software. If the best option is Linux with an AMD GPU and open source drivers then sure I'll buy an AMD card when upgrade time comes.
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So stop saying you care about the four freedoms and just admit the community only cares about free as in beer because that is EXACTLY what we are talking about here.
Because it is all or nothing... Nope. I care about FOSS, and open software. But I NEED it to fucking work! So I run nVidia, and have for a while. I remember getting my second nVidia card, a 7950, and being excited. And it would still work fine now! Not so with AMD. I do run nouveau on one of my systems where 3D is not as critical, but it is just not there yet. Hopefully it will be one day. But in the mean time, I need my card to work!
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So stop saying you care about the four freedoms and just admit the community only cares about free as in beer because that is EXACTLY what we are talking about here.
I see you've been taking diplomacy lessons from George W. Bush, either you're with us or you're with the terrorists. I don't mind paying for a closed source AAA game to run on under free-as-in-beer closed source Steam on top of open source Linux, so shoot me. I value the four freedoms as a good thing, but it's a trade-off between that and what proprietary software offers. I'd like a distro that puts me in control so that I can decide what's best for me. Not a distro that has already decided that because I w
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Still, I consider freedom to distribute the most interesting one for many reasons. For example, Win10 is only free to Win7 and Win8.1 upgraders. OEMs for example have to pay for it. When I suggested selling Windows to a non-profit foundation, I was referring to that one.
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"The other is so hostile to Linux that Linus Torvalds himself gave them the finger and said "fuck you!" to the company."
Was.
After that incident, they've opened up a lot.
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the "four freedoms" have nothing to do with computer code, you spew nonsense like a cult leader. are you a Stallman suckdick?
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If it's an open source driver, then hopefully it will be included with the Linux kernel and you won't have to worry about it breaking every time there's a kernel upgrade, like the fglrx driver has a bad habit of doing.
This is the main reason I switched to the radeon driver, despite lower frame rates and compatibility.
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Maybe the problem's with the kernel, not the driver.. It's the biggest problem with Linux, with every upgrade it breaks a lot of stuff, still haven't had an upgrade which didn't have me trying to fix some problems..
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Gotta tell you, I very seldom have any issues with the open source drivers of either type. If I do, then I just toss another distro on and see what happens. That's it.
Now, the heaviest thing my GPU's going to face is playing a movie - and probably not even in high definition. So, I'm not sure what good my response does.
I very, very seldom use the proprietary drivers. It's not that I care, it's just that I might as well use source that I could read if I wanted to. I'm not only not going to read it, I'm not e
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what's that noise coming out of your computer right now? it's the gpu fan spinning like crazy, because the opensource amd driver can't regulate it properly based on gpu load. i had that problem with hd6970, r9 280x and still see the same problem with my cousin's r9 390x.
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unlikely, as SMC fan control patches were only added to kernel slightly over a year ago (i think linux 3.22?). before that, the default fan speed on free driver was 40%, and 18% on the fglrx. so on ubuntu 14.04, all i got with the original kernel (3.19) was a loud whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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Re:A little pain for a lot of gain (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why people don't like the GNU groups - you are all about freedom as long as it is what you choose for others.
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Nobody forces you to use GPLed software.
The people who write it have the right to distribute it as they see fit.
You are still free to go buy other software or write your own. But bitching because free software does come with strings attached is seriously disingenuous,
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Feel free to install Windows 10 and see what freedoms this gains you. And if you think that insults and profanities give weight to your arguments, you need to think again...
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Feel free to install Windows 10 and see what freedoms this gains you.
You don't have to be such an absolutist. Thanks to freedom of choice I can modify the open source driver if I want, I can use that in certain cases if I want and I can choose the best tool for the job. If a game or application runs better with the proprietary drivers then use those while you're playing that game and switch to the open source drivers if they work better for a different task.
This idea of "if you don't run open source drivers you might as well run Windows" is retarded, not that long ago pretty
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I do agree with this in fact, and I quite probably run binary blobs on some of my computers. This is besides the point.
The point is that I respect the right of the people who give me a free license to use their software to decide the terms of the license.
If I disagree with these, the only reasonable answer is to use something else (which I would pay for), not abuse them saying that they don't respect my freedom.
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I'm not a gamer but there's all sorts of ways to enjoy one's freedom. I think the appropriate word would be liberties but I'm going to guess that that's not something we'll agree on. However, one does have a liberty to decide to not utilize a freedom. Different people have different priorities, they may not match your own. I may use Linux but I'm glad that people are both free and at liberty to choose closed source - if they want. I may not make that choice but I'm glad that they can.
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well said. Now lets see what the cattle says. "Oh I prefer to give up my freedom in order to play game x" :/
Or, perhaps to some people Linux is a tool, not a religion.
Re: A little pain for a lot of gain (Score:1)
And what is it that keeps open source an alternative to the platforms you want to escape? The thing you don't give two shits about.
Doesn't particularly matter (Score:1)
SteamOS is downstream from Debian, which has not deprecated fglrx yet and probably won't until the new AMD driver comes out.
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SteamOS is downstream from Debian, which has not deprecated fglrx yet and probably won't until 6 months after the new AMD driver comes out.
Fixed that for you.
Just because Ubuntu doesn't support it doesn't mean some group out there won't fill in the gap. Webupd8.org comes to mind.
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SteamOS is downstream from Debian, which has not deprecated fglrx yet and probably won't until the new AMD driver comes out.
Ubuntu has 0.4% share of the Steam Market. 40% of Linux's pathetic 1% share of the Steam market. Steam Hardware & Software Survey: February 2016 [steampowered.com] Stats for SteamOS or the Steam Machine aren't to be found here, or anywhere else for that matter.
I suspect because the numbers are so bad no one wants to see them in print.
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Customer support? (Score:4, Funny)
Ubuntu does not exist to support customers. That is what Windows is for!
Re:Customer support? (Score:5, Funny)
Windows supports customers?
Do you have an example?
It downloads the next version for the customer when they forget to ask for it.
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I got a phone call from Windows support the other day. The kind gentleman on the phone advised me that my IP address had a virus and to let him into my computer so he could fix it.
Re:Customer support? (Score:4, Funny)
OH! Oh! I'm sorry! This is abuse!
Oh! Oh I see!
Aha! No, you want room 12A, next door.
Oh...Sorry...
Not at all! stupid git.
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Linux was never meant for gaming.
And neither was Windows.
There's an interesting concept called "progress" that you might want to learn about.
If AAA games ever do run on Linux, and run just as well as they do on Windows,then that will be the beginning of the end for Windows.
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If AAA games ever do run on Linux, and run just as well as they do on Windows,then that will be the beginning of the end for Windows.
Yes, but that will never happen. It didn't happen in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2015, and it won't happen now.
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Actually I think you are wrong. Not because of any desire to support Linux but out of a desire by developers to support linux but a desire to protect themselves from a Microsoft own online store monopoly. Microsoft are clearly looking to create a store that is there by default in every windows install. What published won't want is to be held over a barrel to sell to windows. If 10% of the market is linux and there is a platform, ie steam, that lets you sell to that market, then the game will support it.
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Actually I think you are wrong. Not because of any desire to support Linux but out of a desire by developers to support linux but a desire to protect themselves from a Microsoft own online store monopoly. Microsoft are clearly looking to create a store that is there by default in every windows install. What published won't want is to be held over a barrel to sell to windows. If 10% of the market is linux and there is a platform, ie steam, that lets you sell to that market, then the game will support it.
This will however only happen as the next generation of game engines are released.
Besides, MS only wants to cross the EU so many times. If MS 'encourages' an MS store so much it manages to oust Steam, the EU will come down on them again...
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So Windows is bad because of a monopolistic store, but Linux games are good because of a monopolistic store?(Steam)
I think Steam is a mild impediment, though it otherwise allowed linux gaming on its own.
With security and privacy scandals happening daily or weekly, I'm wary of having to run a single platform that reports by the second what you're playing and when you're playing to the mothership, a US company, and it's unescapable and under your real identity. The thing is that it will go on for decades, too
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Huh? I'm not making any comment on whether Steam is good or bad. I'm talking about an incentive for game publishers to support platforms outside of windows. Steam doesn't hold a monopoly on game distribution, though it is by far the biggest. But people choose to install steam. If windows comes bundled with the microsoft store then it is no different to it being bundled with IE and eating netscapes lunch.
Also steam isn't the only way of playing games in linux. Linux is no different to windows in that r
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I realized that my writing wasn't really an answer to something in particular you said, but it was sent and I otherwise stand by my rant.
humble bundle games
Time-limited sales that have ended by the time you heard of it. That's too weird for me (or perhaps they are torrented around, that would explain slashdot users that say "But you can run Game X from humble bundle")
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Ok some alternatives then, Prison Architect - https://www.introversion.co.uk... [introversion.co.uk], Europa Universalis 4 - http://www.europauniversalis4.... [europauniversalis4.com].
That said the higher the profile the game the more likely they are to come stuck to steam. Borderland series, Xcom series, Civilisation series. They all work in linux but they come via the steam system. But that is no different to windows.
And if you want to pop over to Humblebundle.com now they have 2 bundles of which some are linux compatible. But they are all steam
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That's one whopper of an 'if'. We've been waiting for gaming performance parity for a decade now, and it's still not here.
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Why not? It does it very well. I play plently of games in Linux, some of them even AAA games. Sure there are still lots of games that are windows only but there are heaps that work in Linux and it's not just random indie games.
That's a problem for me (Score:1)
I have many machines that use Mint 17.3 but Catalyst or Crimson doesn't function well on my HP G6 with AMD A4 3300. Some reason the laptop turns on but the display is off. Not until I close the lid and open it again will the display turn on. This bug persists with Ubuntu 16.04 and even with Oibaf PPA which gives me the latest open source drivers. The drivers work great but I'd like to see something done cause this isn't a new problem.
Nomodeset does get the display to work but no 3D acceleration. Quick
Woops (Score:1)
Meant to say Catalyst and Crimson do work but the open source drivers don't.
A better plan (Score:1)
Just drop AMD from your equipment. You'll be a lot better off.
No equivelant replacement is a bad idea. (Score:3, Insightful)
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I will be waiting for Windows 11 then.
Vista/7 lost the ability to run DOS fullscreen, and DOS graphics (there are a few text mode DOS games, those will run)
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Ubuntu has form in this area. PulseAudio and Unity are two of the biggest examples. They were pushed out before they were ready and made life hell. It was a major factor in me leaving that distro.
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You're saying this as if PulseAudio was on the way to ever be ready. Like systemd, its author[s] ignore[s] all bugs that don't apply on his particular system.
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I don't know. Now audio just seems to work on my linux machines. Analogue, optical, surround, hdmi so from my perspective it seems pretty good. I've no doubt that there are some issues somewhere but I haven't run into them for years.
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On the machine I'm using right now:
* quiet but annoying noise all the time
* badly distorted sound after suspend+resume until "killall pulseaudio"
neither of these is hardware's fault as alsa works perfectly.
I could actually use one of pulseaudio's features, redirecting streams on runtime between headphonesspeakers... had it worked correctly.
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Bugger that sucks. Which distro are you using? I have mint 14 on one machine and mint 17 on another, so both using pulse but no issues. I would need to test the suspend resume though as I never use that feature. But I certainly don't have any noise
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So no plans to force you all to use the open source drivers... the breaking news here is "AMD in the process of replacing Linux Catalyst with amdgpu-based hybrid driver
So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep running fglrx until the open source drivers are up-to-snuff.
As long as there is a road map, we should be good.
If they had dropped fglrx and didn't have a plan to replace it then there is a problem.
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As long as there is a road map, we should be good.
Like
1. Strip GNU/Ubuntu of proprietary code
2. ???
3. YotLD
I'd give Pinky and the Brain a better chance at taking over the world with their road map... in a rerun.
The summary fails to mention... (Score:5, Interesting)
That Catalyst was old, bloated, and required old versions of X. Also AMD has been dumping a ton of effort into its opensource driver which is now far superior to its catalyst driver and quickly reaching feature parity with the Windows driver.
Yes, AMD cards used to be terrible in linux, but Ive been playing steam games in linux for the past few years with AMD cards with no issue. I used the catalyst driver till AMD deprecated it about a year ago. When i switched to the opensource driver I noticed significantly better performance. AMDs open source driver isnt quite as good as the proprietary nvidia driver, but its gettin damn close (as long as the application isnt using Nvidia GameWorks).
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"Ive been playing steam games in linux for the past few years with AMD cards with no issue."
How ironic that the subject of your post includes "fails to mention".
You failed to mention that plenty of Linux-supported games on Steam don't even support AMD cards.
There goes your "no issue".
Just to give you one example [steampowered.com] (quoting from the tab 'SteamOS + Linux'):
"NOTE: AMD and Intel graphics cards are not currently supported by Alien: Isolation. Game requires at least OpenGL 4.3"
Since 16.04 is LTS... (Score:2)
Since 16.04 is LTS, if they don't drop catalyst, they are committing to supporting an OS with it for a while. Most likely AMDGPU drivers will be good enough well before the LTS release reaches EOL.
catalyst is deprecated anyway (Score:3)
it's now in the "legacy" pile. I know this because I recently had to reinstall the driver for my other laptop and had to go to the legacy pile for the catalyst driver, as the new package ("Crimson") didn't work. I sort of half expected this anyway, since Catalyst is over decade old now. What, did you seriously expect AMD to support Catalyst forever??
Stop being negative! (Score:5, Interesting)
Putting a positive spin on things, this change isn't about catalyst being so terrible that Ubuntu won't use it, rather the open source driver has come so very very far.
From an AMD and open source perspective, if you want high performance and open source, you have to use AMD, the radeon guys have done an amazing job of bringing along the open source driver, and considering they're now up to OpenGL 4.1, which is truly impressive. The Nouveau driver doesn't suck, rather there is a lot of reclocking magic the Nouveau guys don't have and nVidia won't give them; hell nVidia just released the signed firmware for the 9xx series a couple of weeks ago.
For most folks, the open source driver is good and stable enough, need more, go catalyst or nVidia. I don't know too many people who are hardcore gamers and insist on open source drivers.
Long Term Support (Score:1)
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https://mesamatrix.net/ [mesamatrix.net]
The Boltzmann (aka ROC/HSA) stack also uses the open source drivers, and that covers a lot of HW functionality even Windows drivers don't support.
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