Objectively this is just wrong, the free AMD drivers are provided ootb in the kernel, mesa, and etc. There is no setup required beyond installing Slackware.

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ootb?
You are entitled to your opinion, but I was referring to the drivers provided by AMD either downloaded from their web site or on the CD packaged with the card.

This is not an opinion, the drivers provided by AMD are free now, they are in the default Linux graphics stack which includes stuff like the kernel, libdrm, mesa, xorg. Like Intel, AMD pays their developers to work on free software and this really shows compared to Nvidia with their poor support or Nouveau and their understandably imperfect driver (Lacking docs and firmware).

1 members found this post helpful.

Well Geez! That's exactly the sort of developers I'd like to see on a project (nouveau) people who prefer the competition to what they work on <sarc>.

I am a long time nvidia user but I don't hate AMD/ATi. My very first PC had an ATi All In Wonder ISA graphics card and it was quite decent compared to what else was available back then when all I, or anyone, had was DOS. Unlike most I didn't migrate from DOS to Windows right away. I went with IBMs OS/2 and the first higher performance graphics card that was supported there was Matrox. It was a huge upgrade. Shortly after nvidia made available proprietary drivers for their products in OS/2 and the specs and reviews were compelling so I bought one, a TNT iirc. It wasn't quite the breakthrough in 2D that Matrox was but it's overall performance was an improvement and it seemed nvidia was hellbent to move up both in hardware and drivers, so I went along for the ride.

As OS/2 support came to a winding down and I migrated to both Windows and Linux, because Linux already had nvidia drivers I stuck with nvidia. For well over a decade there was no performance drivers available for ATi in Linux. When they finally did come out, after AMD bought them up, there were a plethora of posts about how hard they were to install and how badly they performed even after that hair-pulling effort. Quite naturally I was glad I'd picked the company that chose to support alternative operating systems (even BeOS) as a matter of course, so I continued to support them and I have never had a bad experience.

As a result of my experience I won't just jump on any old Johnny Come Lately on a whim but I am interested in and a bit impressed by what AMD has begun to do with ATi. If AMD develops a solid set of open source drivers that can compete with nvidia, both hardware and software, I will have no problem migrating yet again but for now I have no problem with nvidia and feel like they have earned my support over decades of effort that has supported my efforts. This is a simple cost/benefit situation, not prejudice and it is based on the long standing track record. As AMD/ATi catches up with long term support and great bang for buck I pay them more attention and consideration.

I'm posting this because I disagree with the characterization of nvidia users as ignorant fanbois beyond any sense of reason or critical thinking. Whatever bias there is for nvidia isn't necessarily against AMD/ATi other than "where the rubber meets the road". It seems that AMD is doing a great job of playing catch up. That they have to catch up to decades of free support is exactly why I don't intend to buy AMD this year or next. In 2-3 years, I will certainly revisit this choice, but they "have to beat the Champ" and it's a bit of an uphill battle. Thankfully for ALL of us AMD seems to feel up to the challenge since competition is good for consumers.

3 members found this post helpful.

Have you ever worked on a project, wrote some code, and it broke something you weren't intending? What about the opposite? You were working on some code and it inadvertently fixed something else? It is very possible that even though it was fixed in 5.13, they weren't aware of it in older versions (especially if they're all using their big, beefy computers as you stated). This is why it is imperative to submit bug reports.

Why are you so willing to complain and complain here, but refuse to do what should actually be done to try and resolve this? If Eric submits the bug report, he can only do so much since he can't reproduce the problem on his end. If you submit the bug report, you can provide a lot more information and can reply back with any additional information they need. If you mention it was fixed in the new version, they might be able to look through the code and figure out what the fix was and backport it to LTS.

Complaining here will only get you so far, and as of right now, you're about as far as you can get on the Slackware forum.

It is true that AMD's current closed-source driver (amdgpu-pro) does take a bit more to install since they only provide pre-compiled packages for other distros. However, with the right SlackBuild (which I admit, I haven't kept mine up-to-date), it becomes just as simple (if not simpler since you don't have to worry about blacklisting nouveau) Nvidia's installer. Since AMD has, so far, not provided an installer for amdgpu-pro, it is certainly much more difficult to get the driver working, especially since they tend to only support single versions of X and a limited number of kernels.

However, you seem to be completely dismissing their open source drivers, which are mainly developed by AMD. AMD is unique in the graphics world in that they actively maintain both open and closed source drivers. Nvidia only does closed source and Intel only does open source. AMD's open-source drivers are usually as good as or better than their closed source and they work out of the box with (usually) no configuration. There's no waiting for patches for new kernels or X versions... they just work. This is substantially easier to "set up" than Nvidia as there is no setup required. To me, it seems AMD's focus is more towards their open-source drivers rather than their closed, although, this is just an opinion based on what I've seen over the last few years.

1 members found this post helpful.

I am also not sure, but I have seen many complaints about AMD's non-free drivers (Especially on Windows) being broken and how long it took AMD to actually do anything about it if ever. On the other hand its trivial to talk to and work with AMD developers working on the kernel or mesa in irc or at various mailing lists.

This has been exactly my experience also. I migrated from AMD to NVIDIA 2 1/2 years ago because of a) lack of updates of Catalyst drivers; and b) NVIDIA's support of their cards is excellent. As the GTX 1070 is probably massive overkill for the games I play now (that's not to say some new game might catch my fancy; hence my choice of video card), AMD will have to come out with a card that has a feature set which will make me want to buy one. I don't see that happening for some time.

As for Plasma 5: Bellyaching aside, my experience with 5.13.1 has been most satisfactory. I did, however, have an ongoing problem with KWin giving me the onerous error message

on startup more than once, and it was driving me crazy trying to figure out what was causing the issue, but a post by Alien BOB about enabling the Composite extension in the Xorg server did the trick. I did a search for what Composite did, and it led me to NVIDIA's documentation, which said:

I looked at that for awhile, and considered that maybe windows drawn directly onto the screen was what was causing the KWin issue. So I decided to enable the extension. Further down, it gave this instruction:

So I did just that, and lo and behold! No more error messages. As a added bonus, KDE started up significantly quicker. Don't know what that's about, but I'll take it. Quicker boot times are always welcome!

I definitely vote for the inclusion of Plasma 5 in Slackware, and the sooner the better. Pat might want to consider the 5.13.x series instead of LTS, though, given the reports of greater stability. Just a thought.

3 members found this post helpful.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tr...drm/amd/amdgpu
https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xf86-video-amdgpu
https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/tree/master/src/amd/

Look, pretty much anyone will admit that Nvidia's proprietary driver is much easier to install than AMD's, but Nvidia doesn't offer any open-source, where AMD is heavily involved in open-source. This is not an apples to apples comparison since AMD offers an open-source driver, which requires almost no configuration and is well-supported on most mainstream distros and usually provides as good as or better performance than the closed-source driver.

I tried the SlackBuild for a nvidia driver and was not successful.

I just followed your instructions and VOILA.

1 members found this post helpful.

one of the reasons why I choose AMD.

I guess you haven't actually looked or maybe even actually used the proprietary nvidia driver. nVidia's documentation is superb and has been for decades. If anyone has any difficulty finding it, even though it is duplicated online, just run the installer like

..and all will be in whatever directory you ran the command. In addition there is considerable extra docs on the use of things like CoolBits. Granted in olden times when I was on a student budget and had to make do with medium quality hardware I paid close attention to BIOS updates but now that I'm older, lazier, and have at least a bit more discretionary income, I just buy the best bang for the buck and prefer messing with firmware as little as possible.

As long as nouveau is primarily for 2D work i don't care how much or how little nvidia shares if the payoff is they can afford to offer such excellent support for their hardware on alternative systems. "Imperfect" isn't even in the ballpark and in fact I find it sheer FUD to associate that term with the superb drivers nvidia provides. They are as good or better than those for Windows, at least for Win 7 since that is the last I ever used. I still have it. I just rarely ever use it except for comparisons like this.

Sometimes I think people conveniently forget that the GPL was designed to accommodate both OSS and proprietary, or did you think that was mere "bait 'n switch"?

1 members found this post helpful.

That's because he can't report that bug and follow up on that bug.
Only the ones that actually has the bad behavior in KDE can report it.
Only the affected can run traces and debug what the developers need and try if patches fixes the problem.
Report a bug or learn to live with the bad behavior.

ootb= Out Of The Box.
The AMDGPU-PRO driver is only for workstations that need profiling and certification it's not the recommended driver for playing games and normal desktop.
For normal users the kernel and mesa driver is the recommended driver and the one that you can expect to see bug fixes for if needed.
For the hardware discussed in this thread 8-10+ years old there are no closed drivers you can download, the open driver is the legacy driver.
Only so no one plays wiseguy it is possible to download fglrx catalyst that supports Xorg 6.9 to Xserver 1.12 and Kernel version up to 3.4 and there are some hacks for newer kernels but it won't work good unless you use a dist from 2013.
It's like an integrated GT220 that don't get bug fixes anymore goes full EOL in January 2019 on windows and 340.* supported thru 2019 on linux and after that the cards are good as paperweights if you don't run an old distribution or nouveau fulfills your needs.
The AMD cards should continue to work good beyond that.
Everything that's not Kepler, Maxwell, or Pascal will stop getting security updates after January 2019 on windows that means full EOL, linux fermi users has a bit more luck since 390.* is supported thru 2022.
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answ...egacy-products
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answ...ail/a_id/3142/
I got nothing against old GPU's i got some around still, this was more of an explanation for someone that doesn't use AMD and isn't used to AMD driver strategy.

1 members found this post helpful.

You speak of different things.
You talk about the documentation for the Nvidia driver, he talks about the documentation of the hardware and the firmware.

I disagree, their documentation is sorely lacking and taking a quick look at the state of nouveau is a good example of this. That said you misunderstood, their poor support is in regards to the other software installed. Kernel and xorg updates regularly break Nvidia drivers and legacy drivers are sometimes never fixed. Also if you find a bug there is not much that can be done besides reverse engineering the driver and offering your wishes to devs who may or may not be paying attention unless you also happen to be the nvidia maintainer for a project like ffmpeg.

Do you even know what those words mean?