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

[blackiwid]

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

Dont get me wrong Archlinux was one of the two candidates I considered and tested for switching. I have a archlinux installation on my Laptop still, and even installed it after tried to explain the advantages of both fedora and arch on the laptop of my brother. And installed fedora on the pc of my dad.

Most advantages u get on both distries. And yes there are some small disadvantages fedora has maybe, like less good wiki as example. And some very exotic tools u have to compile yourself in fedora where u find a package in AUR.

But there are some points why I know like fedora more:

- more commitment to use nearly only free software (not good enough for fsf-recommendation but closer than any other mentioned distro)
- sometimes better official packages or earlier, had to wait several months till I got mesa 9.2 while in f19 it was included as rc2. tried to compile 1hour the aur things didnt work 2 times.
- the packages they deliver are better maintained by paid full-time working peolple.


they are close, also yum works for me better, and even in gnome they have update-mechanism that works for endusers (my dad)

...

[blackiwid]

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.

I am not so shure about that, we will see, but if you look at the wiki they say they dont update shit except it has security fixes or is the kernel ^^ so a update 10.2 is not nessecary happening. But ok there is something about major and minor versions so u maybe are true.

But again they delivered mesa 9.2 rc2 before it is officialy stable in fedora 19 so I am pretty shure they would have NOW 10.2 in a fedorra 21 version.

[oibaf]

This:

X1950PRO: failed to schedule IB when it came to Tesseract test...

is a known issue:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76558

[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

[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.

[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.

[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

[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]

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]

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.