I am using the AMD legacy driver from PPA and it works fine, from XFCE you must run with sudo the amd center from the console, but is a geat solution for us, no improvements, but still does it job
Today I took the plunge, I tried to drop catalyst for the open source radeon driver (upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 to 12.10). I did some testing in previous years and month, and radeon never fully convinced me (unstable, power consuming, underperforming). Today's experience completely confirmed my disbelief in the radeon driver: for laptop users it simply does not work. Power consumption is incredibly high, the temperature reaches inacceptable levels. Under the "low" profile both issues get a lot less proplematic, but then random xserver crashing make my live miserable.
The irony is, that I bought this laptop because I wanted to support the AMD open source driver strategy and hoped for quick OS driver support. Now I am stuck without a working OS nor a propietory driver (well, an xserver downgrade works for the moment to get an old catalyst running again).
What did I learn from this exercise: For laptops buy INTEL only. For this usecase you need stability and low power consumption, but less so performance. I am looking forward to my Lenovo X1 Carbon to arrive in the next few hours. I will give the AMD OS strategy another try in about 4 years earliest.
I am using the AMD legacy driver from PPA and it works fine, from XFCE you must run with sudo the amd center from the console, but is a geat solution for us, no improvements, but still does it job
It seems the future will be Wayland and Weston, and probably then we can buy actual high end GPUs or similars for less than 50 USD to keep our machines working with latest versions or install LTE distros, Google does work with Ubuntu LTEs, and they work fine aren't them?
But I would like a Samsung Exynos MALI GPU alike aproach to make the old drivers GPL in part, and APACHE in the other part, and if they are not able to do so, make it modular with a small closed module and let the big part open with GPL and or APACHE licenses for helping the community improve their open drivers, wich i was using for a while and have improved a lot since last time I used them.
And a lot more things as i watched at the ubuntu PP LTE event.
https://www.change.org/es/peticiones...acy-12-6-linux
I have just signed this petition - in spanish but you know how to use Google translator -