Catalyst or OSS? Which one should people use?

[dungeon]

What you just said is a word jumble that makes zero sense.

Just wait for drivers to become available in your current distro before you buy.

So Catalyst for Tonga was there in last year Ubuntu i think, what other more sense you want There is no reason to wait

[duby229]

I don't know why you keep asking me to repeat myself, but here goes again....

Catalyst sucks for desktop usage. It is annoying. So use the OSS drivers to prevent from getting fed up, but to do that you should wait and buy hardware that already has drivers available in the distro you currently use.

[dungeon]

Catalyst sucks for desktop usage. It is annoying.

Maybe for you, not for me. It is fine.

So use the OSS drivers to prevent from getting up...

Ah there we are, you want to prevent its usage because you have problem with it and think that others should feel the same

... but to do that you should wait

There is no reason to prevent that, so there is no reason to wait. People can buy any AMD hardware and use it in Linux, with no wait needed.

What driver you will use to accomplish that, is your choice.

and buy hardware that already has drivers available in the distro you currently use.

How do you know what distro (and version) end user currently use (who are yours end users?), is that also something which also goes as part as your another recommendation - which for OSS usually means switch over to newest git, your newest packages are newest release but are still more broken then git

[duby229]

I ended the poll and edited the opening post.

[dungeon]

I ended the poll and edited the opening post.

Thanks.

EDIT: This poll is obviously biased and narrow, But I think it does prove at least to some extent a common viewpoint.

You maded it to be biased... what is either/neither there i still dunno

But I think it does prove at least to some extent a common viewpoint.

It shows nothing. I didn't vote there, because it does not make sense to do that.

[zakhrov]

OK I'm gonna try and inject some sanity into this discussion.
1. If you have older hardware (Radeon HD 5000/Evergreen and below) You'll want the OSS driver because its more stable, works on the latest kernel and is probably gonna wind up in the catalyst legacy driver soon.
2. The sweet spot is actually Catalyst vs radeonSI. Here again it depends on several factors- The distribution release model, the kernel and graphics stack shipped by default, and the kind of games you play. Most FOSS games (OpenArena, Xonotic, Tesseract etc) work on both drivers pretty well but you'll have better luck with finding support on the OSS driver since these games were written mostly with Mesa in mind. Steam games and other AAA titles "Officially" support only Catalyst but the Gallium drivers work with a few of them (at least the ones Michael uses for his Catalyst vs Gallium benchmarks). Here again you are in a fix since Catalyst's OpenGL performance is hit and miss on most of these games (I'm referring to Michaels LOTR Shadow of Mordor review)
3. If you want to live on the cutting edge/Bleeding edge and have AMD's latest Fury graphics cards or the TONGA based r9 285/380 then Catalyst is your only hope for now. the AMDGPU driver which is supposed to support these is still in its early stages of development and it will be a while (Linux 4.4/4.5) till its in any shape to run games and other stuff.

Caveats:
Caveat1:
If you are dependent on Catalyst stick to LTS releases and default shipped kernels. Catalyst works best on slightly older kernel and graphics stacks. KDE 4.10 and up had desktop composting problems with catalyst 12.3 (last Catalyst version my hardware is supported on, have since then switched to the OSS driver). Dont know if AMD (or KDE) fixed this in newer versions.
Caveat2:
Gaming under WINE as far as I know works with both drivers but performance varies sometimes wildly. Some games need the Gallium nine backend to work with the opensource drivers (Batman Arkham Asylum is the only one I've tested) while others are happy with Wine's direct3d emulation. Others are the opposite ( the 2006 NFS Most wanted works only with gallium-nine disabled). Some games (Star Trek Online) refused to work on the gallium drivers till they reached GL3.3 compliance with Mesa 10

[zakhrov]

If you are gamer do not use kde, unity, gnome and other resource hungry desktops.
wine-staging is the best windows platform for linux.

I'm not a full hardcore gamer And KDE isn't that resource hungry when it comes to game performance.
I use OpenSUSE and they have this lovely repo that packs Mesa-Git and wine-staging patched with Gallium-nine support. Its maintained by the GearsonGallium project and focuses mostly on gaming with the open source drivers