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by pjmlp 2496 days ago
> Graphics problems have not been a problem for the last decade.

Except one happens to have a laptop with an older AMD card or Optimus Intel/NVidia combo.

2 comments

Older AMD? Any AMD card or igp made in the last 14 years works out of the box with Linux, save their newest GPU arch.
Tell that to my AMD Radeon HD 6330M, released in 2010, 8 years ago.

The open source driver still doesn't provide feature parity with the proprietary one that Ubuntu LTS dropped support for.

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

Namely hardware video decoding and OpenGL version.

Sounds more like AMD dropped support for Linux. It's shitty, but I'm not sure what you can expect from distributions if AMD stops updating their drivers for newer versions of xserver.
Yep, while you can still get the up-to-date driver for Windows, fully DirectX 11 compliant.

So this thing about marvelous open source AMD support, depends pretty much how much luck one has.

I don't have laptops with older AMD. My current laptop has the ability to switch between CPU and discrete GPU, but it doesn't work well even under windows, so I disabled it in BIOS.

AMD drivers have been hit and miss for a while, which is one of two reasons I tend to prefer NVidia cards. NVidia took time to make sure their whole stack works reasonably well.