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AMD's Crimson Radeon Driver For Linux Barely Changes Anything (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: AMD Windows customers were greeted this week to the new "Crimson" Radeon Software that brought many bug fixes, performance improvements, and brand new control panel. While AMD also released this Crimson driver for Linux, it really doesn't change much. The control panel is unchanged except for replacing "Catalyst" strings with "Radeon" and there's been no performance changes but just some isolated slowdowns. The Crimson Linux release notes only mention two changes: a fix for glxgears stuttering and mouse cursor corruption.
I didn't follow this closely but is second rate support for Linux by AMD anything new??
Since the late 90s I've always used nVidia for Linux systems* and I've never regretted that choice. I would prefer having nVidia open-source their own driver (nouveau has made progress but just isn't there yet) but this is not a big deal to me. I run a source-based distro (Gentoo) so I compile my own kernels anyway; it's no big deal to add "&& emerge --oneshot nvidia-drivers" at the end of that command line. That's the most I've ever had to do. Unfortunately some binary distros are more "purist" out of either ideology or fear of legal action so they make users jump through a few hoops to get proprietary drivers and codecs.
The more I heard about first ATI and now AMD driver quality on Linux, the more convinced I am that I made the right choice. I hope AMD gets their shit together in this area because competition is a good thing.
* That's on my desktop system which has a discrete card. My netbook with Intel graphics runs Linux Mint which "just works" (I believe that driver *is* open source, MIT licensed IIRC).