AMD Releases Catalyst 12.1 Driver For Linux

[Crypto_ahash]

Well its a damn miracle. They finally fixed all my Gnome3 issues. Gnome3 with gnome-shell is still a bit slow. But thats probably my slow APU.

[DaemonFC]

So this is the third straight month that using Xv takes down the current stable build of the X server with AMD Catalyst installed.

GNOME Shell and Unity still have many known problems with it. (And they claim they support Ubuntu)

KDE still has to fall back to a backend that simulates OpenGL 1.x fixed functions or Catalyst explodes.

Catalyst still completely undoes the last five years of improvements to the Linux video driver stack.

and

It's still proprietary software that taints your kernel, and could expose you to security problems either because AMD doesn't care to fix them or because a government paid them to put them in. You install it and you no longer know what your computer is doing.

Did I miss anything? Do people install proprietary drivers because they don't have enough grief in their lives?

It's impossible for AMD or any proprietary driver maker to truthfully claim that their drivers support X and/or Linux (more so than X). It borders on false and deceptive advertising in my opinion. Even if they cared to do more than the half-assed work they are doing, free software moves too fast for them to keep up.

[DINAMIK]

the big problem here is that the open source drivers is really poor, so fglrx is the only way where you can "USE" (yes... use) your expensive hardware. Unfourtunally, the ATI/AMD development cycle is not according with the X and kernel times so any new release takes at least 1 year to work properlly. in the other hand, AMD and Nvidia does not see linux users as a business now, I guess that it is growing and in a few years the enterprises will change their expectatives.
I will test the driver today on linux mint 12 because I'm disagree with the current performance of gallium 3d.

[PsynoKhi0]

Below are some of the notes that I have concerning what's become the public Catalyst 12.1 Linux release, which is now fully marked as an AMD driver without lingering ATI references.

I suppose you mean the binary's name now include "amd", since the /etc/ati and /usr/share/ati folders are still there, the config utility is still called aticonfig etc.
No issues to report here. I might have a go at the XBMC with XvBA support and see how it goes.

[dargllun]

I might have a go at the XBMC with XvBA support and see how it goes.

Yeah, and please be sure to report back how it went! :-)

[Forage]

Too bad, the random GNOME Shell crashes still occur...

[d2kx]

Unity works excellent (ppa:vanvugt/compiz & ppa:vanvugt/unity contain all the performance fixes that will be upstreamed with Ubuntu 12.04)

XvBA with XBMC works excellent.

KDE works excellent (although it uses OpenGL 1, but no performance issues at all with KDE 4.8).

That is using E-350/HD 6310 (notebook) & HD 6870 (desktop).

[DINAMIK]

Too bad, the random GNOME Shell crashes still occur...

what card? series?

[Forage]

what card? series?

ATI/AMD Radeon HD6950, running with Ubuntu 11.10 (32bit) and Gnome-shell.

[DINAMIK]

ATI/AMD Radeon HD6950, running with Ubuntu 11.10 (32bit) and Gnome-shell.

I have installed catalyst 12.1 on Linux mint 12...

bad news... poor performance. all desktop experience laggy... my card is an HD4670.
I hope enjoy gnome 3 before my card will be considered as legacy product.