From The Linux Perspective: What I Am Most Looking Forward To In 2019

[pal666]

They are the biggest contributor on GitHub,

this is very skewed metric. it does not mean they are biggest opens source developer

[pal666]

Yes, developers are forever busy porting form gtk+2 to gtk+3 to gtk+4.0. Same with QT toolkit.
No commercial vendor is ever going to port their propriety applications to this ever changing GNU/Linux desktop which represent < 2% split over 10 different versions.

you are contradicting yourself. qt and gtk is not gnu/linux desktop, it is win32/macos desktop and there are plenty of proprietary apps using it. including apps from microsoft: my skype uses gtk3

[cyberwizzard]

I'm looking forward to Nouveau getting reclocking support and supporting the latest nvidia cards.

At the same time I hope that the EGLstream backend for kwin materialises.

[Guest]

Definitely nice to see AMD's FreeSync code hitting mainline, albeit quite a bit later than originally expected in a heavily re-factored and thus more cross-vendor usable form. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I genuinely applaud them for going along with it, but it seems like that's become a theme with AMD's major additions to the DRM codebase.

Still, it makes me genuinely curious as to what's next as AFAIK that was the last really major thing on their Linux todo list. Are we going to see more performance improvements, additional Vulkan features being added quicker after the spec is finalized their and/or that long awaited GUI configuration utility similar to what's on Windows?

How about making stable drivers that don't keep breaking all the time? I've had bad experiences for the most part with AMD GPUs, despite being very enthusiastic and preferring AMD over NVIDIA - I've compiled kernels, bisected them, filed bug reports - the support is still bad. The drivers just aren't stable and reliable.

Intel drivers on the other hand are rock solid and just work day in and day out. I use Arch Linux, I use the testing repo, I'm already running Linux 4.20, I update to newer software versions regularly, and I've rarely experienced any major bugs with Intel GPU drivers.

[L_A_G]

...

Ok... You do realize that what you're saying sounds pretty anecdotal? If that was a common experience there would be a lot more complaining about the quality of the AMDGPU drivers, but I haven't seen anything like that since AMD put the old fglrx drivers to pasture.

[mulenmar]

Incels to stop whining about being made to be decent human beings. *mic drop*

[Guest]

L_A_G - https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91880

The long saga of the R9 390. There was a brief time in the middle of last year where it worked fine. Afterwards support was swiftly broken, and new problems arose (blank screen after suspend and resume - old trick, new dog). It's still broken on Linux whereas the Windows driver works fine - so it's not some rare hardware defect.

Maybe some AMD GPUs work well with the Linux drivers - almost everything else I've tried has been a buggy broken mess and still woefully lacks in terms of feature support compared to the Intel GPU drivers.

I spent a lot of time, effort and had a lot of hope that AMD would come through - all for nothing.

[Brisse]

Maybe some AMD GPUs work well with the Linux drivers

Fiji, Polaris and Vega. That's where most of the development effort has gone into. Hopefully they can focus on getting older cards working now that these newer GPU's are in good shape, but that is entirely dependent on good will because I doubt there is any economic incentive for them to do so.

[L_A_G]

The long saga of the R9 390. There was a brief time in the middle of last year where it worked fine. Afterwards support was swiftly broken, and new problems arose (blank screen after suspend and resume - old trick, new dog). It's still broken on Linux whereas the Windows driver works fine - so it's not some rare hardware defect.

Read trough that and they do come to the conclusion that it's not universal and thus it's either related to a hardware defect or AIB partner changes to boards/firmware the Windows drivers can handle (similar to the at-launch issues with the RX 590). Additionally, the 390 is a 2nd gen GCN card (it's a re-badge of the R9 290 from 2013) and IIRC AMDGPU officially supports only 3rd gen or newer.

[ryad]

Maybe some AMD GPUs work well with the Linux drivers

I can tell you that at least my rx580 is working just flawlessly. Kernel 4.18, 4.19, 4.20, mesa 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 19-git no matter what I try to do, they just won't crash or something...