LAS F22 review - summary

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

If you want to do high-performance computing in the GPU in Linux, you
pretty much need both the proprietary drivers *and* proprietary HPC
libraries from the vendors. For a variety of reasons I don't expect
that to change. There's been some steps towards opening those things
up, but I have never been able to get them to run in *any* Linux
distro *ever*. It's not Fedora or Ubuntu or openSUSE - it's the
vendors.

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 10:13 AM, Steven Rosenberg
<stevenhrosenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
> --
> desktop mailing list
> desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop



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