On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 3:04 AM, Enrico Tagliavini <enrico.tagliavini@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Steven,
as I said already I was the person doing the fglrx package for gentoo
for a couple of years (and I stepped up because radeon was not good
enough for my card), so I know the pain. And I can tell you this is
100% AMD fault. Long story short their main targets are enterprise
distributions like Red Hat and SLES. They try to get Ubuntu as well
but at the end of the day they have to ship a very pre release driver
just for Ubuntu to get it working. They don't care about upstream
Linux kernel and Xorg support and they don't care about Fedora.
This is the reason I stepped down from the fglrx package maintainer in
gentoo. It is not that Fedora people has no love for fglrx, it is
simply that fglrx doesn't work with up to date components. *It cannot
start at all*. Don't call Fedora contributors or rpmfusion devs hater
on Catalyst, they are not! It is the opposite: AMD has no love for
Fedora and upstream Linux and Xorg. It is 100% AMD fault.
You can see a very different behaviour in the two main competitors:
Intel has a serious open source driver solution, Nvidia is promptly
supporting new upstream releases.
Crippling Fedora by shipping *unsupported* kernel releases (normal
kernel releases are supported for a very short time) or outdated Xorg
packages would be a great damage to the Fedora project. As much as
free software and open source packages should meet a quality standard
in Fedora (for example see why Chromium is not available), so must
proprietary stuff if that has to be included (via rpmfusion if this is
the preferred way). Fglrx, as it is today, is not going to meet the
requirements. Maybe the new version based on AMDGPU has a chance....
only time will tell.
If you want to use AMD hardware you have to use an OS supported by
them. Fedora is not one and this has to change AMD side first, then a
package in rpmfusion would appear in no time I'm sure.
The text you quoted from me was not to ask for inclusion of every
proprietary driver, especially at the expense of the main project
goal. But of course software alone doesn't make a computer, if you
have a component better supported by proprietary drivers where the
open source one is missing or falling short (your point about your
laptop aging out is very valid, and very frustrating process) I think
the proprietary option should be available with a reasonably low
effort for a normal user (not an advanced user). So my point was not
to add more proprietary drivers into rpmfusion (well not necessarily),
but to make it a little bit easier for the end user.
Thanks for the clarification. I know how hard it is for the end user to keep fglrx/Catalyst working, and that is often with the help of a packager.
I don't know how Debian and Ubuntu manage to keep fglrx in their distros, but I imagine it's because they keep the same kernel version throughout the release, whereas Fedora is continually changing kernels during that time.
Now that my laptop is two years old, it runs great with Radeon, and I no longer have to worry about upgrading the kernel and breaking fglrx. So I'm happy.
But the newest hardware often needs the newest kernels -- a great reason to run Fedora. Unfortunately Radeon doesn't always support the latest AMD chips, and that's where fglrx comes in.
I guess the takeaway is, "Buy AMD at your own risk."
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