LAS F22 review - summary

[Steven Rosenberg]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 1:41 AM, Enrico Tagliavini <
enrico.tagliavini at gmail.com> wrote:

> well you might be lucky enough not to need proprietary drivers and
> this add a lot of benefits both in practical terms and also in ethics
> if you believe in free software. That said if you don't support
> proprietary driver you basically cut out people from using Fedora. The
> only and main reason I don't suggest Fedora to my friends starting
> with Linux is it misses NVIDIA proprietary drivers support and
> bumblebee packages [1]. Granted there is rpmfusion for the drivers....
> but bumblebee is another story. The repo mentioned in the fedora wiki
> is not really up to quality standard, at all. But I digress.
>


RPM Fusion support for Nvidia seems OK, but support for Catalyst/fglrx has
been nonexistent in Fedora 20-22.

My hardware (2013 HP laptop) eventually "aged out" of needing
fglrx/Catalyst, and running the open Radeon is less trouble, for sure. But
for new hardware, it's sure nice to have Catalyst (and I presume Nvidia)
around and packaged.

But I've accepted that the Fedora Project doesn't want proprietary graphics
drivers in its archive, and would really (really, really) prefer that its
users refrain from using them.

Even when packaged by RPM Fusion, the Catalyst driver is a pain to use in
Fedora because the kernel is updating so frequently. Installing it from
upstream is even worse.

Luckily Radeon driver and Linux kernel development moves so fast that after
a year I was able to successfully run w/o Catalyst. But that first year was
hell.

I've been running Fedora on this laptop since F18 because it was the best
on this hardware at the time, and I love Fedora. But if Catalyst was
important to me, I'd be looking elsewhere (CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu ...).

While Fedora is plenty stable overall, it's not so stable when running
Catalyst because AMD is so far behind and Fedora is moving so quickly, so
for those reasons -- plus Radeon's great strides in recent years -- I don't
miss it.

But there is no love for Catalyst among Fedora contributors, or somebody
would be packaging it for RPM Fusion.

--
Steven Rosenberg
http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog
http://blogs.dailynews.com/click
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