AMD Catalyst: Ubuntu 12.10 vs. Windows 7

[D0pamine]

News Flash: Open Source is DOA without tens of billions of corporate dollars to make it exist. GNU doesn't exist without the cash and it don't come from joey in his basement or your enthusiasm.

Talk is cheap.

Money talks, bs walks.

The Radeon Open Source driver doesn't exist without AMD's cooperation in documentation.

You sit around for the next 6 years to get today's blob parity. The rest of the globe will be using those blobs 6 years down the road.

you're so full of shit its not funny

[juxtatux]

at the risk of not making sense again.

Why don't you game devs LFS, gdb, blob, wine?

~/Jux
"?" - Me

[pandev92]

News Flash: Open Source is DOA without tens of billions of corporate dollars to make it exist. GNU doesn't exist without the cash and it don't come from joey in his basement or your enthusiasm.

Talk is cheap.

Money talks, bs walks.

The Radeon Open Source driver doesn't exist without AMD's cooperation in documentation.

You sit around for the next 6 years to get today's blob parity. The rest of the globe will be using those blobs 6 years down the road.

Ohh yes, Blob is fantastic, gl output cause tearing , xv is so slow on smooth scenes, 2d perfomance is poor, and problems with chrome and gpu aceleration, please...., no joke.

[D0pamine]

Because the majority of us don't bother with your kernel?

Just saying, developers like him and me are the people you need to convince to code for Linux if you ever want it to gain market acceptance. You're not doing a very good job at it though...



Question: Why was the GPU working during the Win8 install (as I'm inferring that Win8 works fine based on how you wrote your comment), but not on Linux, out of the box? I'm assuming a driver issue?

I mean, sheesh, MSFT made ATI/NVIDIA support 640x480 32-bit color out of the box, with no driver support required, as of Vista (2006). No idea why Linux can't fall back into this mode for DX10+/OGL3.0 capable cards if theres a missing driver...

woah woah woah! i'm not trying to convince you to do anything and 'linux' doesn't need you - if you agree to the terms of the GPL then you should want to contribute what you can whenever you can - thats how it works! As i've stated already GNU/Linux has market share already although not on desktop PCs and laptops... or toasters for that matter

All I am saying is that using non-free binary blob drivers hurts development of the free drivers as there are fewer end users giving feedback

[Marc Driftmeyer]

You guys disappoint me, why do you say you love open source but then you choose binary blobs when they clearly hinder development?

Why not help the open source drivers instead. *Sigh*

We'll never get improved open source drivers if we always go with the blob.

News Flash: Open Source is DOA without tens of billions of corporate dollars to make it exist. GNU doesn't exist without the cash and it don't come from joey in his basement or your enthusiasm.

Talk is cheap.

Money talks, bs walks.

The Radeon Open Source driver doesn't exist without AMD's cooperation in documentation.

You sit around for the next 6 years to get today's blob parity. The rest of the globe will be using those blobs 6 years down the road.

[gamerk2]

Alright - what sort of game developer doesn't know about basic things such as how to enable s3tc and how to compile mesa as your 'I don't have the time' statement makes me wonder if you would even know how to. Even on a modest system it cant take more than 5 commands and a few questions in the terminal to create a deb/rpm/tgz for mesa and around 5 minutes of compile time. Not that you have to recompile mesa to use s3tc but using the latest and greatest mesa will give better performance.

Because the majority of us don't bother with your kernel?

Just saying, developers like him and me are the people you need to convince to code for Linux if you ever want it to gain market acceptance. You're not doing a very good job at it though...

Let me give you a real life scenario that one of my 'thick as shit' friends went through the other day - he tried to install ubuntu on a machine with a super new nvidia card in ( a gtx280 or something ) and the installer failed due to the graphics card not functioning properly so I suggested he use the text installer which he did and everything installed fine. When he came to boot his shiny new stock ubuntu the desktop wouldn't load again because of the graphics card not functioning. I explained that he should - ctl+alt+f1, login, and sudo apt-get install nvidia-drivers - However he could not because nm-applet had not connected to the network. At that point he gave up and installed windows 8 beta or something

Question: Why was the GPU working during the Win8 install (as I'm inferring that Win8 works fine based on how you wrote your comment), but not on Linux, out of the box? I'm assuming a driver issue?

I mean, sheesh, MSFT made ATI/NVIDIA support 640x480 32-bit color out of the box, with no driver support required, as of Vista (2006). No idea why Linux can't fall back into this mode for DX10+/OGL3.0 capable cards if theres a missing driver...

[D0pamine]

No. When you are a distribution maintainer, don't enable drivers that are not stable for most hardware. Simply don't. Vesa + llvmpipe would have worked fine. Slow, but fine.


Why didn't your friend just compile a new kernel + mesa? Oh wait, not everybody is an expert on linux.

does vesa allow for a compositing desktop?

the nouveau driver would likely not work on a card so new thanks to nvidias helpful nature so compiling a kernel and mesa although educational would not be helpful

[ChrisXY]

and the moral of this tale is? blobs are a pain in the arse for the 'average user' and not wanted by the 'advanced user'. If the nouveau driver had worked out of the box which it should have done ( thanks again nvidia for helping with framebuffers ) then this would have been a breeze.

No. When you are a distribution maintainer, don't enable drivers that are not stable for most hardware. Simply don't. Vesa + llvmpipe would have worked fine. Slow, but fine.

You sir are a bullshitter who has the time to defend a closed binary driver on a forum and yet does not have the run a few simple commands to even try the latest efforts from the people at mesa and I cant wait for your game to hit the shelves

Why didn't your friend just compile a new kernel + mesa? Oh wait, not everybody is an expert on linux.

[D0pamine]

I never said I was a "casual user", I said we share a common problem of practicality. If you where actually trying to have a constructive back-n-fourth with me rather than desperately looking for flaws in my statements, then you would be questioning my specific statements instead of constructing straw-man arguments.


Only because it's impractical to do otherwise for both me, and my target audience.


I will try and test on the open-drivers more in the future, but I only have so much time. Beyond that, I'm rather bored of this conversation and I probably won't be responding again. Good bye.

Alright - what sort of game developer doesn't know about basic things such as how to enable s3tc and how to compile mesa as your 'I don't have the time' statement makes me wonder if you would even know how to. Even on a modest system it cant take more than 5 commands and a few questions in the terminal to create a deb/rpm/tgz for mesa and around 5 minutes of compile time. Not that you have to recompile mesa to use s3tc but using the latest and greatest mesa will give better performance.
Let me give you a real life scenario that one of my 'thick as shit' friends went through the other day - he tried to install ubuntu on a machine with a super new nvidia card in ( a gtx280 or something ) and the installer failed due to the graphics card not functioning properly so I suggested he use the text installer which he did and everything installed fine. When he came to boot his shiny new stock ubuntu the desktop wouldn't load again because of the graphics card not functioning. I explained that he should - ctl+alt+f1, login, and sudo apt-get install nvidia-drivers - However he could not because nm-applet had not connected to the network. At that point he gave up and installed windows 8 beta or something

and the moral of this tale is? blobs are a pain in the arse for the 'average user' and not wanted by the 'advanced user'. If the nouveau driver had worked out of the box which it should have done ( thanks again nvidia for helping with framebuffers ) then this would have been a breeze.

You sir are a bullshitter who has the time to defend a closed binary driver on a forum and yet does not have the run a few simple commands to even try the latest efforts from the people at mesa and I cant wait for your game to hit the shelves

[F i L]

you are a casual user who is a game developer who doesn't know how to install a s3tc lib and cannot compile mesa

I never said I was a "casual user", I said we share a common problem of practicality. If you where actually trying to have a constructive back-n-fourth with me rather than desperately looking for flaws in my statements, then you would be questioning my specific statements instead of constructing straw-man arguments.

you want to support free software by using a closed driver

Only because it's impractical to do otherwise for both me, and my target audience.

yes you do contradict yourself alot and if you as a game developer use the free driver(s) rather than the blob(s) you can report bugs and suggest improvements - if you do not you cannot

I will try and test on the open-drivers more in the future, but I only have so much time. Beyond that, I'm rather bored of this conversation and I probably won't be responding again. Good bye.