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Mesa's Highlights Reel: An Impressive Year For Open Source 3-D Drivers
Michael Larabel at Phoronix has been assiduously reporting on some of the small advancements in open source 3-D graphics; in aggregate, those small advancements make for big improvements in hardware (and platform) support, as well as higher performance. Phoronix published today a year-end wrap-up highlighting some of the ways that Mesa has developed; it's quite a list.
An excerpt: This time last year core Mesa and the drivers were still limited to OpenGL 3.3 compliance while in 2015 we've seen core Mesa reach up to OpenGL 4.2 support. The AMD RadeonSI and R600g drivers have raised up through OpenGL 4.1 (though R600g is limited in what supports GL4) and the Nouveau NVC0 driver is at OpenGL 4.1 as well. The Intel Mesa driver is still at OpenGL 3.3, but they are extremely close to OpenGL 4.2 and should hit that milestone in early 2016 after having been recently focusing up on OpenGL ES 3.1 support, which they did achieve this year.
Besides tackling more GL4 support, Mesa this year has seen the new VirtIO GPU driver for 3D support in guest VMs, continued work on the new Raspberry Pi 3D driver (VC4), video encode/decode improvements, and other Gallium3D state tracker highlights.
Without backwards compatibility, they're useless for me at work. We do GL2 and GL4 side by side (legacy vs. new development) and the open source drivers just fail at initializing because they don't support the backwards compatibility profiles. Also, with Vulkan coming out next year, it'll be a bit tough if they aren't working on that yet.
-SaNo
Well then, enjoy your 300Mb installers and limited kernel compatiblity.
Ignoring games and few other software everything just works with free drivers, even better than the audio subsystems
you install your preferred linux distro, load some games (directly, via steam, even wine if you really want) and most of then will work.
For intel and amd cards, that is the true (only very recent cards use the new amdgpu driver that aren't yet on this level, but getting close fast and will be able to easily use either open or close drivers without change kernel driver). Same games have the same performance as the close drivers, other still need more drive
optimization. Very new games that require opengl >4.2 in linux are not common and mesa already support many features of higher opengl levels... but yes, one can install a modern linux distro and play games without even knowing anything about linux.
For nvidia cards, as nvidia isn't really helping, the performance is not yet good, but thanks for the nouveau team and the help from intel and amd development, the drivers are getting more and more usable.
Higuita
I can only agree. I have and AMD card and the company dropped driver support for my card, a Radeon 4870, in 2012. The card is still able to play most games, it was a really good card when I bought it. Was really p*ssed off, when AMD dropped the support. For me, Mesa improvements were awesome. In 2012, Mesa/Gallium was a lot slower and had a lot less features. Personally, I saw the most improvements in 2014, speedwise. But 2015 wasn't bad either. When Witcher 2 was released early this year/last year(don't remember) it didn't work at all with stable Mesa drivers, but it worked with drivers from the trunk. When Civ5 BE was released, the game didn't work at all. Couple of weeks later, it worked somewhat and I just tried it, it seems to work flawlessly. Sure, there are still lots of problems, e.g. Divinity OS EE was released (finally) a few days ago. Doesn't work. It seems, the game needs an OpenGL 4.2 function which is still not implemented on Radeon. But chances are good, that it will be implemented in the next couple of weeks, it's only one of two missing extensions to become 4.2 compliant. http://mesamatrix.net/
You really had to run off to OSX because of Systemd? I call BS.
First, there are still distros that do not use Systemd. Sure, switching distros might involve a learning curve but you just switched operating systems!
Second, While I mainly use Gentoo I just spent a couple months with playing with other distros on my laptop. I had desktops set up in both Debian Jessie and Ubuntu. I wasn't quite sure... was Ubuntu using Systemd or Upstart? Yeah.. that's how much it mattered for desktop use... not at all!
Eventually I switched back to Gentoo and good old OpenRC but it wasn't because of Systemd not working. I went back to Gentoo for reasons that had nothing to do with init and OpenRC only because it's what I know best.
Why did I bother switching away? Gentoo lets you have things your way. I mean.. really really your way. After figuring out what all my favorites were back in about 2001 Gentoo never really made me change them. It just happily builds the latest releases of all that old software. I had to switch away for a while to get a better feel of what is out there so that I could come back and set up a less ancient feeling desktop! Once I came back I just had to 'emerge' my 'perfect' combination of my new and old favorites. Now I am good to go again for a while.
So.. if there is something you won't let them take away until they pry it from your cold dead hands... like your favorite init system... just switch over to Gentoo, not OSX! WTF were you thinking?
Oh.. and compiling isn't really a big deal. Just do it in the background in a screen session. If you want to use your computer before you even have the base system compile that's doable too. Skip the Gentoo CD and use your favorite Linux Live CD. Yes, you can build Gentoo from there... inside screen... while you use all those desktop apps anyway. You can even set your builds to a high nice level if you are afraid that background building will interfere with your computer use although I rarely find it necessary to do so even on my nearly fossilized hardware.
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