The Dirty List Of GPUs With Open-Source Drivers Gone Wildly Wrong

[blackiwid]

can you downgrade packages easily in fedora? do you have alternative, PPA-like repos in fedora?

yes to both.
The termology is a bit different and some stuff work a bit different but the short answer would be yes.

The long answer is, I have way better experince in "pinning" stuff in fedora than I ever had in ubuntu/debian. IN debian most time I played around with pinning I kind of self-destructed the distribution. It should be doable but it seems I am to dumb to do it in debian.

In fedora its so easy: yum install mesa repos=rawhide ; before u have to add the rawhide repo but also thats pretty easy. Described in their wiki.
Or writing that in some file to permanently whitelist a program.

PPA like things exists also, except they are less commonly used. First u have the one major unofficial repo called rpmfusion. There u find stuff like xbmc and so on...
But there is also a think called Copr, what would be equivalent to ppas, there is as example a copr of gnome 3.12.

http://copr.fedoraproject.org/

its a advantage that u dont depend so much on copr for every single peace of software u do in ubuntu, it just hurts to have 20 ppas, if you try to update or any of this ppas just break. In general u get just way more and newer stuff in the official repositories. As example I got in fedora 20 updates from kernel 3.11 to now 3.14 u also get newer firefox versions. Their versioning System is a bit more flexibel, or lets say has another phylosopie. They dont update everything just to upgrade it, but keep it pragmatic I guess.

For kernel they just admit that they dont have the manpower to backport every bugfixes, and for firefox or stuff like that it seems they dont want to update it generaly but when security fixes come with newer version (that seems to happen always ^^) they just update it too.

Also for kernel they say on their site that u have older ones in grub to boot from too. u dont have only 1 version installed so even if it fucks something up... you would have a working older verison installed.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy

But with that said it doesnt feel that old like it feeled in ubuntu. I nearly often could not wait till beta1 of ubuntu-next is out, till I upgraded, often I updated even in a alpha. In Fedora I dont have that urge, because u get new kernels and new enough X-drivers/mesa. If I feel that as example mesa would be to old its easy to just upgrade mesa from "unstable" rawhide and keep the rest normal.

Fedora 20 is released: 2013-12-xx current mesa version: 10.1.3
Ubuntu 14.04 released: 2014-04-xx current mesa version: 10.1.0

and thats even a very old version in fedora, in fedora 19 was mesa 9.2rc2 worked great, and I that was the first version with vdpau support for amd driver. So they kind of use even pre-releases if many users have big advantage over it (at least it feels that way ^^)

[d2kx]

Fedora 20 is released: 2013-12-xx current mesa version: 10.1.3
Ubuntu 14.04 released: 2014-04-xx current mesa version: 10.1.0

Mesa 10.1.3 is in trusty-proposed for some time and will get to trusty-updates next week or so.

[blackiwid]

Mesa 10.1.3 is in trusty-proposed for some time and will get to trusty-updates next week or so.

I can look now whats in fedora testing? ^^

10.1.4-3.20140521.fc20

even if it would be the same version, the point is that fc20 came out short after ubuntu 13.10 thats the main point. if they would not have skipped as exception the half-year release we would have already at least a 10.2 version.

And even:

Ubuntu next (utopic): 10.1.3
Fedora rawhide: 10.2 (10.2-0.9.rc5)

of course having bigger version numbers isnt always better per se, if all goes unstable for that as example. But my point was, that u want newer stuff faster fedora is maybe the better distribution, and if you like commitment to free software and upstream.

Of course if you like to use older stuff longer and want to use unfree drivers ubuntu is most likely the better alternative.

[blackiwid]

I just feel that even while I used ubuntu redhat developed or helped devoloping all the good stuff people in linux use now. as example they developed AIGLX, GNOME, SYSTEMD. In ubuntu u get more and more ubuntu-only technology, or they get forced to use as example systemd.

Now u get ubuntu-only mir + unity. and there also some other technical small things that I just loved in fedora.

- yum can manage kernel updates: they keep the 2 newest and replace older with the newest ones, a big bug in ubuntu that they keep WONT-FIX-ITS-A-FEATURE
- a tmpfs ramfs is pre-installed: you must be hyperconservative to not have that installed, it seems nearly to me that ubuntu dont focus on the desktop at all because there its a very good thing.
- ubuntu needs a ppa for profile-sync-daemon of course in the fedora repository.

So for a real dau that are hyper-scared ubuntu is maybe a way to go. but only if he makes a big enough root partition else he will just not be able to start x if the 100. kernel installed filled up his complete harddisk.

[TheOne]

In ubuntu u get more and more ubuntu-only technology, or they get forced to use as example systemd.

Thats because when they submit patches to mainstream projects for supporting unity/mir stuff they get rejected. The ubuntu hatred of other project maintainers is the cause of the effect you are talking about. At least arch people is more open minded and have included unity desktop on arch user repo, but they had to patch a lot of dependencies because those patches haven't been accepted mainstream.

[blackiwid]

Thats because when they submit patches to mainstream projects for supporting unity/mir stuff they get rejected. The ubuntu hatred of other project maintainers is the cause of the effect you are talking about. At least arch people is more open minded and have included unity desktop on arch user repo, but they had to patch a lot of dependencies because those patches haven't been accepted mainstream.

The main question is not what u do, but how, and how u communicate it. And here Canonical just sucks.

1. they hype wayland then with clearly proven false reasons they make a more or less 1-1 clone with canonicals name on it.

2. instead of making like cinamon another shell for gnome they make a incompatible thing that has no advantage.

3. I am shure that not patches will be negated because they come from canonical (maybe after all the shit they did that happens now on some rare occations), but they as example differ from as example gnomes user experience guidelines

its nearly like we talking here about russia and putin, all hunt canonical and mark all hate him, because of that he has to rescue the freedom of all users or something.

I dont care somebody asked about fedora and I talked about it, I did compare it to ubuntu because many people use ubuntu and this article mentioned ubuntu and I refered to it as bad plattform for testing new free drivers. if people love ubuntu for commitment to proprietariness (and there are many nvidia users that love that) use it and be happy I have no problem with it, I just dont do it anymore. I am done with it ^^

And if I would have known what I know about how bad technicaly ubuntu is and how much better fedora is, I would have switched earlier.

[TheOne]

And if I would have known what I know about how bad technicaly ubuntu is and how much better fedora is, I would have switched earlier.

Saying that is like saying "how bad technically debian is" in any case if your technical knowledge is better than before then you shouldn't be using distros like, fedora, suse, ubuntu... To live on the edge then a stable rolling release distro like archlinux is the best thing of the world. I get up to date kernels and open source video drivers without having to deal with third party repositories, also I can forget about lengthly system upgrades since arch is always up to date. Also on arch you can install an lts linux kernel release in case a new one brakes the correct functioning of your gpu.

You can much pretty say that archlinux is the distro that is guiding how others distros make things up. Arch was one of the first distros that started using systemd, and for now it has proven pretty stable, so thats why other distros are adopting it. Anyway this thread isn't a discussion on which is the best distro but how f***** off is some video hardware with open source drivers.

I would advice to anyone depending on open source drivers to better use a rolling release distro, is a dream come true :P

[Luke]

Pr-64 bit AMD idled wide open

I have a similar system somewhere around here (XP 2000+). But honestly these oldies consume more power than they are good for anything

That problem is specific to AMD K-7 chips, which had high enough power consumption to run very hot and use a lot of electricity, but had yet to implement any tricks to reduce power used even at the same voltage and clockspeed. I had Athon XP and Athlon thunderbird chips show almost no temperature difference between idling at the desktop and rendering a video!

A Pentium III was slower that an Athlon at the same clocks but ran far cooler when not under load even though it had only one voltage and clockspeed. My guess is that gates not being used for computation must have defaulted to "off" on the Intel and to a random value on the AMD.

The AMD 64 procs fixed this. They all offered power management when desktop Pentium 4's did not, but even with it turned off ran far cooler at idle that at full load. When I got one of those in 2008 I was amazed at the better cooling and reduced average power use, even though peak power use was higher unless it was a late 65nm version. I do not know what fab size it was, I got in in an $80 bundle with a board and ram.

I would guess that a K5 or K6 would run hotter than a Pentium, but at that level power consumption is not very high anyway.

[nanonyme]

even if it would be the same version, the point is that fc20 came out short after ubuntu 13.10 thats the main point. if they would not have skipped as exception the half-year release we would have already at least a 10.2 version

Fedora 20 is currently going with 10.1.4 which is afaik considerably higher than it originally shipped with. I don't consider it that unlikely that 10.2 would get in when it's final, the decision to upgrade from 9.x to 10.x probably took considerably more guts than 10.1 to 10.2 would. Fedora is not Ubuntu.

[dungeon]

That problem is specific to AMD K-7 chips, which had high enough power consumption to run very hot and use a lot of electricity, but had yet to implement any tricks to reduce power used even at the same voltage and clockspeed. I had Athon XP and Athlon thunderbird chips show almost no temperature difference between idling at the desktop and rendering a video!

Hmm, i used Athlon XP 2200+ for years and no problem with power consumption but i was used athcool... so that is the trick for those , if someone use these CPUs just install that, temerature goes 10-15 lower and consumption nearly 50W lower on idle .

https://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/athcool