Who said so? With libre radeon driver you don't have any 3D acceleration because of the missing binary blob (firmware).
3D acceleration works with ATI cards only if you want to use the binary blob.
Use Intel graphics if you want 3D acceleration to work with truly libre system without binary blobs.
Gnome Shell worked great with Intel Graphics in Gnome 3.0.
Which binary blob (firmware) do you refer inside libre radeon driver?
According to xorg-x11-drv-ati package, it contains:
/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/ati_drv.so
/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so
/usr/share/man/man4/ati.4.gz
/usr/share/man/man4/radeon.4.gz
I am currently using a E-350 powered laptop on Fedora 18 with 3D support out-of-box. Having participed to Fedora Test Day for Radeon driver,
I can run decent 3D applications without a problem.
if you have a old laptop with first generation radeon's or any gpu without a proper driver really
you are going to have to run openbox or fluxbox or lxde
so what's really the point complaining about this?
Hi, this's my first post :-P
I've the radeon driver in a debian testin gnome 3.4 with Gallium 0.4 on AMD CEDAR
with glxinfo i have:
$ glxinfo
name of display: :0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
...
videocard:
$ lspci |grep AMD
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Manhattan [Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series]
so supposedly i've 3D and gnome shell works perfectly except few blue flashes ¿?
Other thing is with games but i don't care because i don't want to use the private driver.
Go Gnome !
If any distro still feels they need to supply a fallback de they should package a light weight de such as lxde along with Gnome 3. Why expect Gnome to maintain a panel, and whatever else is involved, when there are a number of perfectly good light weight desktop environments focused on that kind of thing.