Hello,
I have an old laptop ASUS X53BR with AMD Radeon HD 7470M graphics card (CPU AMD E450 1.65GHz, 6GB RAM). Originally there was Windows 7 installed. Now I would like to try to install some Linux. And that is the problem - beacuse of old AMD graphics card most of distros which I tried are unusable - I'm not able to install them or they are too slow. So far I tried various versions of Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Lubuntu. I successfully installed Linux Mint 17.3 only. But performance was not good although graphics card was installed properly.
Please could you try to recommend me a whatever distro which will work fine on my laptop? Of course if it is possible...
Thank you very much.

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

This thread is a few years old so not sure if it will help. The AMD driver is proprietary and from 2105 so no clue how well it works.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...riendly-distro
https://www.amd.com/en/support

1 members found this post helpful.

The way the AMD drivers work, new cards are supported on proprietary drivers, which are slower than windows ones. Older graphics cards are supported in the kernel, in OSS drivers, with lots of support from amd sources. The linux end of AMD development is poorly staffed.

M$ got seriously miffed when people were laughing at their laughable efforts and buying Macs. So they gradually hauled their OS around. Things like DirectX helped. So windows outperforms linux graphics still. Anyone who puts a comsumer windows server up will be hacked by the first passer by. Not so for linux. And linux is catching up with regular updates to Xserver, Mesa & all drivers.

Get on AMD's site with your pc with the radeon card and see if there's a linux driver for it. Otherwise, it's in the kernel. Linux is serving too many specialist markets servers, desktops, arm, all types of boxes on a great variety of cpus, and can't be hauled around in like manner. Just a quick glance at your card shows it can use opencl and vulkan APIs, but they may or may not be compiled into your Mesa, and may or may not improve performance. Your card came out in 2012; don't expect too much.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you guys. I was able to successfully install (including graphic card drivers) only distributions based on Ubuntu 14.4. But performance was worse than in Windows. So it probably doesn't make sense trying to install on this laptop Linux...

You can mark this solved, then.

Back awhile I had a hand-me-down Nvidia MX-440 on 66Mhz pcie in an old 32-bit box with an Athlon(?) on 1440x780(?), and a 2007/2008 RS675 on pcie(2x or 4x) with a 64-bit AMD twin core Turion on 1280x720. Both were on proprietary graphics. On paper, you would expect the X1250 to be the better performer, but it couldn't even lip synch a video on full screen. I ended up in email conversation with one of the devs, as I was upset, and anxious to optimize what I had. I discovered that from 2001 or thereabouts to 2007, basically no serious work was done on AMD linux graphics dev.

Around 2007 a small linux graphics department was set up, and started playing catchup with insufficient resources. AMD/ATI were losing the CPU wars, losing the graphics wars to Nvidia pretty badly, and in danger of becoming irrelevant. Budget cuts came and this small department was also cut. Also, some of the handiest ways to do things were patent protected by competitors. When LLVM was young, I painfully recompiled Mesa and the graphics drivers according to instructions using --with-LLVM because 'The X1250 has no vertex shader' (whatever that is) and the code required to emulate that required llvm. It still wouldn't lip synch a full screen video. At 3 years old, my new card was obsolete, and I was kicked onto developing kernel drivers. Generations of AMD GPUs made improvements. AMD were hamstrung by having larger wafer fab size. (In car terms, you have a normal engine, but the competition has a turbo charger). This is a problem they have solved by contracting fab to Samsung. They were stuck up at 28nm before that.

They have caught up a lot, with plenty added to Xserver, Mesa, & graphics drivers. Their achievement is measurable by the fact that intel, with superior fab size and bigger budgets couldn't become competitive in graphics. My card needed a patch in later years for console blanking which came in 3.19.x kernels (2015), and the comment was of the ilk
/* For all that old sh** we made */. Nvidia were still supporting my 2002 card!

1 members found this post helpful.