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You still have the source to the old drivers. It's just not a priority for others to support anymore, but you have the means to go add that support yourself, or pay a third party to do it for you.

Contrast with when windows changed the video driver architecture in Vista, and the only option you had was to pound sand.

bunderbunder 2869 days ago

Seems like a pretty easy cost/benefit analysis to me:

I can either spend thousands of dollars worth of my time on updating the driver, or I can pay someone else thousands of dollars to do it. Or I can spend a fraction of that on a new video card.

Seems like the only solution for Vista users is the only solution I'd ever have gone with, anyway.

Sure the cost/benefit works out the same for you (which is why no one has done the work), but that's different from the full set of options available to you in both cases.

bunderbunder 2869 days ago

How expansive do we want to be about what the full set of options is, though?

I tend to fall on the side of the root poster - if having a stable driver API means Linux gets more commercial driver support, then that's the one that has the highest cost/benefit in my book.

In practical terms, being able to hack on open-source drivers isn't particularly useful to me, but having an easier user experience with Linux on the desktop (and, more generally, having Linux on the desktop be something more than an also-ran) would benefit me immensely.

I skipped Vista, however my XP drivers were fully supported on the upgrade to 7.

iforgotpassword 2869 days ago

Some xp drivers work on 7, most don't. Also unlike user space, you cannot run 32 bit drivers on 64 bit windows, so unless you were running 32 bit win7 you needed 64 bit xp drivers, which were rare. Are you sure you explicitly installed xp drivers and didn't just happen to have hardware where windows shipped matching drivers or could download them from the windows driver database? (Or downloaded an installer bundle from the manufacturer's website that just contained drivers for all supported platforms..)

core-questions 2869 days ago

Womp womp. Most of those netbooks are unusably slow anyhow, and were when they were brand new too. Run an older kernel on there and call it a day.

Sorry but a DirectX 11 class dual core APU is good enough for general purpose gaming.

And runnig legacy kernels? No thanks.

Which GPU is it specifically?

AMD Fusion Brazos APU, Radeon HD 6250

Certainly looks supported by /dev/radeon, just not /dev/amdgpu.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalys...

I didn't said it wasn't supported, I said:

> My Asus Netbook no longer gets all the acceleration options that it used to have pre 16.04.

Which holds true, because /dev/radeon no longer offers hardware video decoding support it once did unless I force enable it, and even then it usually leads to random X crashes when watching videos.

And then there is this,

"For one, AMD users can’t use applications that require OpenGL 4.3 or later without the fglrx/Catalyst drivers."