Canonical have decided to deprecate the fglrx driver in Ubuntu 16.04. This is hardly surprising news as fglrx, which has always been renowned for being a pain, has steadily becoming more and more of a problem on modern Linux distributions. Even Debian with its tentatively updated packages has surpassed the official system requirements for fglrx.
Ubuntu is one of the last distributions to have had support for it, and to make that happen Canonical had been patching the driver files themselves to get it to compile against current versions of X and Linux. The most recent version of Ubuntu that is officially supported by AMD is 12.04.
AMD are expected to release the new Catalyst Linux driver sometime in the summer, which will be based on the AMDGPU open source driver. However it will still have limited support and will not cover the majority of AMD Linux users needs, as AMDGPU is still very much a work in progress.
Ubuntu will now be using the open source drivers for AMD GPUs as other distros are doing. But for now those drivers are also still a work in progress, and functionality is hit and miss depending on your GPU when it comes to gaming.
In my own systems that run on APUs, gaming is sadly impossible for the moment on the open source drivers, but hopefully things will start to change on that front in the coming months.
As always with Linux you can install it yourself, but it will probably be a nightmare in this case. I gave up after many attempts, but best of luck too you though if that is your plan, I hope you're familiar with the rescue terminal :D.
Most Linux gamers will be unaffected by all this, as the majority of us use Nvidia. But I can't help but wonder how many potential new Linux gamers will be turned off of the platform during this AMD limbo period. As a lot of newbie users go to Ubuntu, and a lot of off the shelf systems these days ship with APUs.
Sources:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-16.04-Dropping-fglrx
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseNotes#fglrx
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Linux+x86_64 Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Ubuntu is one of the last distributions to have had support for it, and to make that happen Canonical had been patching the driver files themselves to get it to compile against current versions of X and Linux. The most recent version of Ubuntu that is officially supported by AMD is 12.04.
AMD are expected to release the new Catalyst Linux driver sometime in the summer, which will be based on the AMDGPU open source driver. However it will still have limited support and will not cover the majority of AMD Linux users needs, as AMDGPU is still very much a work in progress.
Ubuntu will now be using the open source drivers for AMD GPUs as other distros are doing. But for now those drivers are also still a work in progress, and functionality is hit and miss depending on your GPU when it comes to gaming.
In my own systems that run on APUs, gaming is sadly impossible for the moment on the open source drivers, but hopefully things will start to change on that front in the coming months.
As always with Linux you can install it yourself, but it will probably be a nightmare in this case. I gave up after many attempts, but best of luck too you though if that is your plan, I hope you're familiar with the rescue terminal :D.
Most Linux gamers will be unaffected by all this, as the majority of us use Nvidia. But I can't help but wonder how many potential new Linux gamers will be turned off of the platform during this AMD limbo period. As a lot of newbie users go to Ubuntu, and a lot of off the shelf systems these days ship with APUs.
Sources:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-16.04-Dropping-fglrx
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseNotes#fglrx
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Linux+x86_64 Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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As long as I have access to Windows in dual-boot, I'd never pick Nvidia. Nvidia driver is too much pain overall (not to mention that it's also the most aggressive, unlikeable, and opensource unfriendly company out there). Radeon driver just works, most games work fine, and for the few ones that don't, I reboot and play in Windows. And AMD needs some support for moving things in the right direction.
Building the packages can be done easily from said rescue terminal if you end up in a worst case scenario. I haven't used the official ubuntu packaged version of fglrx in ages. (I haven't upgraded from 14.04 yet either though.)
For ordinary cases, I feel this is handled quite optimal, at least on Debian. "apt-get install nvidia-driver". Handles kernel updates gracefully as well.
Nice profile you have there!
True, but working hard on something you intend to deliver at some unspecified point in the future isn't going to help sway Windows 10 refugees when they want to dip their toe in the Linux lake and test the waters.
AMD has been promising "something better, soon" for... years?
I'm buying a new graphics card, probably after the summer. Time will tell what I go with, but while I'd love to be proven wrong, I wouldn't bank on it being AMD.
Additionally, it's very refreshing to see Intel take the kernel driver approach. Now if only their GPUs were powerful enough for high end UHD gaming.
You mean like you can with the AMD driver now
Had an AMD card since the 5870 days, I either go to the repo and install from there or go to AMD site , double click, enter root pass then install.
Ok I admit the 4xx kernel bugged on the 15.11s but was fixed with the 15.12's iirc. Mageia don't tend to jump straight onto the latest kernel though.
Know idea if you still have to kill X server for the nv driver to install.