<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 3:04 AM, Enrico Tagliavini <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:enrico.tagliavini@gmail.com" target="_blank">enrico.tagliavini@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div id=":yo" class="a3s" style="overflow:hidden">Hi Steven,<br>
<br>
as I said already I was the person doing the fglrx package for gentoo<br>
for a couple of years (and I stepped up because radeon was not good<br>
enough for my card), so I know the pain. And I can tell you this is<br>
100% AMD fault. Long story short their main targets are enterprise<br>
distributions like Red Hat and SLES. They try to get Ubuntu as well<br>
but at the end of the day they have to ship a very pre release driver<br>
just for Ubuntu to get it working. They don't care about upstream<br>
Linux kernel and Xorg support and they don't care about Fedora.<br>
<br>
This is the reason I stepped down from the fglrx package maintainer in<br>
gentoo. It is not that Fedora people has no love for fglrx, it is<br>
simply that fglrx doesn't work with up to date components. *It cannot<br>
start at all*. Don't call Fedora contributors or rpmfusion devs hater<br>
on Catalyst, they are not! It is the opposite: AMD has no love for<br>
Fedora and upstream Linux and Xorg. It is 100% AMD fault.<br>
<br>
You can see a very different behaviour in the two main competitors:<br>
Intel has a serious open source driver solution, Nvidia is promptly<br>
supporting new upstream releases.<br>
<br>
Crippling Fedora by shipping *unsupported* kernel releases (normal<br>
kernel releases are supported for a very short time) or outdated Xorg<br>
packages would be a great damage to the Fedora project. As much as<br>
free software and open source packages should meet a quality standard<br>
in Fedora (for example see why Chromium is not available), so must<br>
proprietary stuff if that has to be included (via rpmfusion if this is<br>
the preferred way). Fglrx, as it is today, is not going to meet the<br>
requirements. Maybe the new version based on AMDGPU has a chance....<br>
only time will tell.<br>
<br>
If you want to use AMD hardware you have to use an OS supported by<br>
them. Fedora is not one and this has to change AMD side first, then a<br>
package in rpmfusion would appear in no time I'm sure.<br>
<br>
The text you quoted from me was not to ask for inclusion of every<br>
proprietary driver, especially at the expense of the main project<br>
goal. But of course software alone doesn't make a computer, if you<br>
have a component better supported by proprietary drivers where the<br>
open source one is missing or falling short (your point about your<br>
laptop aging out is very valid, and very frustrating process) I think<br>
the proprietary option should be available with a reasonably low<br>
effort for a normal user (not an advanced user). So my point was not<br>
to add more proprietary drivers into rpmfusion (well not necessarily),<br>
but to make it a little bit easier for the end user.</div></blockquote></div><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Thanks for the clarification. I know how hard it is for the end user to keep fglrx/Catalyst working, and that is often with the help of a packager.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">I don't know how Debian and Ubuntu manage to keep fglrx in their distros, but I imagine it's because they keep the same kernel version throughout the release, whereas Fedora is continually changing kernels during that time.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Now that my laptop is two years old, it runs great with Radeon, and I no longer have to worry about upgrading the kernel and breaking fglrx. So I'm happy.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">But the newest hardware often needs the newest kernels -- a great reason to run Fedora. Unfortunately Radeon doesn't always support the latest AMD chips, and that's where fglrx comes in.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">I guess the takeaway is, "Buy AMD at your own risk."<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature">--<br>Steven Rosenberg<br><a href="http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog" target="_blank">http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog</a><br><a href="http://blogs.dailynews.com/click" target="_blank">http://blogs.dailynews.com/click</a><br><a href="mailto:stevenhrosenberg@gmail.com" target="_blank">stevenhrosenberg@gmail.com</a><br><a href="mailto:steven@stevenrosenberg.net" target="_blank">steven@stevenrosenberg.net</a></div></div>
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