AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support

[Kamikaze]

They don't 'stop' nouveau, they said,

They said that? Source please...

nVidia's CEO once said (and I'd love to find that quote again), that he'd never do opensource drivers, he saw it more of an disease if anything

That's interesting and worrying if true... could you try and back up the claim and find a source for this?

If I wanted the blob I would use CentOS or some other longer term supported distro, as Fedora and the like do not really work well with the blob anyway. In fact, for the people I know that use the blob this would be the best solution anyway.

You may be surprised, but not all Linux users are technical enough or care enough to bother to install a different distro so their graphics card will work with fglrx. I know a few people that run Ubuntu and have never stepped outside of that ecosystem. They still always update and try and keep the latest version of their OS, so next time they try and do an upgrade to a new major release with this hardware and using fglrx they'll be in for a nasty surprise. IMHO this kind of thing is another obstacle hampering further widespread adoption of Linux as a desktop platform.

Then AMD drops blob support, which is the expected things to do after you open source your specs, and what happens? people complain.

I think the point is that many don't believe the opensource driver is performant or complete enough to handle what people are using their cards for. I've already seen someone mention in this thread that some games they would like to run do not work or render correctly with the FOSS drivers. I'm also not sure I see how dropping support in the blob will automatically benefit the development of the FOSS driver, unless you think they're going to invest more money into it's development?

It seems to me that AMD are useless in providing adequate support for the binary blob, but also don't have enough implemented in the FOSS drivers, so it's a no-win situation at the moment for the consumer and for AMD. It's a pity they can't invest more time, effort and money into bringing the FOSS drivers to feature parity and at least close to blob performance for chipsets they are about to drop the blob support for... why can't they do this anyway?

Finally - having used both nVIDIA and ATi/AMD cards on Linux, in the past I'd never had an issue with getting an older NVIDIA card (even with the legacy drivers) to work under a new distro (with a newish X.Org) on their binary blob, but had countless problems when I tried the same with fglrx. If nVIDIA can do this on their binary blob, why can't AMD? (Note: I'd prefer proper FOSS support too, but I thought I'd ask the question)

[Kivada]

I think I agree with some of the critic earlier in the thread: A part of the problem is too on the FLOSS side, there is no part of the API that will remain stable for several years of updates, while on Windows we know for a fact that a service pack won't break it

Lemme stop you right there, they'll likely do what they did with the previous hardware support drop, drop support for OpenGL 3/DirectX 10 class hardware for Windows as well, Windows 8 would then only support DirectX 11 class hardware. This has several benefits for them, but it's not the "planned obsolesce" many are thinking it is, what it gains them is forcing the OEMs to have to use at least semi current hardware with the AMD boxes they are pushing, which means better sales and a better customer satisfaction with nongeeks that make up 99% of the market as they won't be getting woefully outdated hardware with a bloated OS like what happened with Vista and the POS boxes the OEMs where putting on the market.

If you don't like this, switch distros, regular ass Debian should cover you, as would Ubuntu 12.04 or Mint 13 and RHEL based distros like CentOS will also cover you till you decide to buy a new GPU or more likely you buy a whole new computer by then.

[Kivada]

You may be surprised, but not all Linux users are technical enough or care enough to bother to install a different distro so their graphics card will work with fglrx. I know a few people that run Ubuntu and have never stepped outside of that ecosystem. They still always update and try and keep the latest version of their OS, so next time they try and do an upgrade to a new major release with this hardware and using fglrx they'll be in for a nasty surprise. IMHO this kind of thing is another obstacle hampering further widespread adoption of Linux as a desktop platform.

If they managed to find Ubuntu they can find how to stay on 12.04 or move to Debian. I'm certain the Mint guys will be scouring the net in the coming months to snipe Ubuntu users to move to Mint13.

[bridgman]

But did you ever see prelaunch AMD OSS drivers?

Ontario and Llano both had prelaunch OSS driver support (although it was problematic on a number of systems until the new DP bridge chips were figured out), and Trinity support has already been pushed.

[Kamikaze]

If they managed to find Ubuntu they can find how to stay on 12.04 or move to Debian. I'm certain the Mint guys will be scouring the net in the coming months to snipe Ubuntu users to move to Mint13.

In some cases they've started using it because a friend recommended it. Also a lot of people don't want to read up on their OS to find out things like 'fglrx is no longer supported on newer X.Org releases' and then have to find what X.Org server release comes with the next upgrade, etc etc. They just see an update available, and click 'Upgrade'. If you're going to position your OS as a desktop suitable OS, you have to be able to deal with the masses that do this. AMD not supporting fglrx for more then a few years won't make this any easier!

Re- Linux Mint and a bit off topic - I recently put a work colleague who had a HP Pavilion dv6 laptop onto Linux Mint 12 less than a month ago (the ubuntu based one, not LMDE), and honestly I've had more problems to deal with then I expected. I had issues with repartitioning the disk in the installer infact it failed entirely at one point and had me worried (It was around the point of shrinking the NTFS I think). Then I had issues once I'd selected to install the fglrx driver (surprise surprise), I think this had something to do with the SNB architecture aswell though (I didn't look into it too much, decided to get rid of fglrx on there as the user did not play any games). I vaguely also remember the user having problems installing Chrome from the .deb on the web, and needing to install the 'xz' package to get around it... I like Mint, and use LMDE on a system at home, but I think it has a way to go in terms of "ease of use" for new users switching from Windows.

[Hirager]

In some cases they've started using it because a friend recommended it. Also a lot of people don't want to read up on their OS to find out things like 'fglrx is no longer supported on newer X.Org releases' and then have to find what X.Org server release comes with the next upgrade, etc etc. They just see an update available, and click 'Upgrade'. If you're going to position your OS as a desktop suitable OS, you have to be able to deal with the masses that do this. AMD not supporting fglrx for more then a few years won't make this any easier!

Re- Linux Mint and a bit off topic - I recently put a work colleague who had a HP Pavilion dv6 laptop onto Linux Mint 12 less than a month ago (the ubuntu based one, not LMDE), and honestly I've had more problems to deal with then I expected. I had issues with repartitioning the disk in the installer infact it failed entirely at one point and had me worried (It was around the point of shrinking the NTFS I think). Then I had issues once I'd selected to install the fglrx driver (surprise surprise), I think this had something to do with the SNB architecture aswell though (I didn't look into it too much, decided to get rid of fglrx on there as the user did not play any games). I vaguely also remember the user having problems installing Chrome from the .deb on the web, and needing to install the 'xz' package to get around it... I like Mint, and use LMDE on a system at home, but I think it has a way to go in terms of "ease of use" for new users switching from Windows.

So much trouble with Ubuntu derivative? Wow. Anaconda installer is much better tool.

[squirrl]

My xbox's r600/r500?? still has support though. Microsoft has been patching it for years.

[Qaridarium]

My xbox's r600/r500?? still has support though. Microsoft has been patching it for years.

xbox do have a r600 chip "xenos" buts its the other way arround the r600 are xenos chips.

[Kivada]

In some cases they've started using it because a friend recommended it. Also a lot of people don't want to read up on their OS to find out things like 'fglrx is no longer supported on newer X.Org releases' and then have to find what X.Org server release comes with the next upgrade, etc etc. They just see an update available, and click 'Upgrade'. If you're going to position your OS as a desktop suitable OS, you have to be able to deal with the masses that do this. AMD not supporting fglrx for more then a few years won't make this any easier

So take it up with Canonical to check for the affected GPUs + FGLRX combo and tell the user that they will be unable to use FGLRX with 12.10.

Really though, most people won't notice much of a change by then as the HD2-4 series actually work really well with the Gallium3D driver, so this is mostly a non issue for most users.

[Kano]

@bridgman

I am pretty sure that IVB owners will have got less problems (should be pretty similar compared to SNB). Also they can use video accelleration out of the box, any time estimation when this will be done?