Post by faeychildPost by AragornThat was for the proprietary ATi driver, if I recall correctly.
Setting up the Nvidia driver used to be easy, before Nvidia became
Invidious. :p
And insidious :-) I've never used ATI Maybe they collude on
install scripts
ATi was acquired by AMD a long time ago now, and although there were
some problems with regard to the driver source code at first due to
non-disclosure agreements, AMD have in the meantime managed to
open-source all of their drivers.
They do still have a proprietary driver — amdgpu-pro — but there is
actually very little that you'd need that driver for. For 95% of the
users, the free amdgpu and radeon drivers will do just fine.
The amdgpu driver is the only one seeing much development these days,
but it seems to work nicely. Mageia did have a bit of a problem with
sddm and one group of AMD cards a year ago. This was the "transitional"
group of cards that for a long time worked with radeon, but
experimentally with amdgpu. Mageia was using radeon with those, but when
the sddm login screen acted up, the switch to amdgpu cured it. Strangely
enough, the older cards that won't work with amdgpu don't have the same
problem with the radeon driver and sddm.
Post by faeychildI dread the the event if the update ever fails (like Grimble) and i
am stuck without graphics.
The recovery process is in copious notes on the HD and not in a hard
copy "brain book" like Bit twister has.
I would be stuffed and I have an update pending this morning. A new
kernel which always includes the remote possibility of a nvidia
problem. So far I have been lucky.
I have left all of that behind me. My current daily driver — this
machine here — has onboard Intel graphics, and they are perfectly fine
for all my needs. I can watch movies in UHD (1920*1080), I've got 3D
effects in Plasma, and I'm not a gamer, so I don't need any high-end
graphics adapters.
But if I did, then I'd go for AMD. Nvidia is consistently refusing to
collaborate with the Linux kernel developers — which AMD and Intel have
proven to be both technically possible and perfectly good for business —
so Nvidia can go to hell for all I care.
I have one AMD-based machine with older AMD onboard graphics. At the
time I acquired the used motherboard, I didn't find out until later that
Libreoffice had a problem with older AMD graphics, so I bought an nvidia
card for it.
It worked OK, but then came the news that nvidia wouldn't support it any
more, so I dumped it and bought a very cheap used AMD card on eBay. It's
an HD 8490, and still uses the radeon driver. But the thing is, when I
run benchmarks to test graphics updates, this card consistently out
performs the onboard Intel graphics of even my newest machine.
I have another, equally inexpensive, that I bought for an older
Intel-based machine, because the older GPU just wasn't really good
enough. That one was an HD 8570, just over the line into amdgpu
territory. When I run those same benchmarks on that machine, it gets the
best scores of any I have.
And no messing around with building drivers. I'll NEVER go back to
nvidia, unless they make a radical change to their Linux policies.
TJ