As many of you may know, the maintainer of the AMD Catalyst driver in RPM Fusion has decided to stop work on the package, and as a result there is no packaged version of the Catalyst/fglrx driver for Fedora 20 -- and no updates of the driver for Fedora 19.
Yes, the Radeon driver has made great strides in recent months, but for my hardware -- a newish AMD APU -- the Catalyst driver is still far and away better in terms of speed, CPU load and functionality. I recommend NEVER installing AMD Catalyst directly from upstream, but I've tried over the past few days -- against my own advice -- to do just that. I have been unsuccessful in installing Catalyst (and still don't recommend doing it). I'd love to know enough about Fedora, video drivers and the like to do the packaging of Catalyst myself, but I am not anywhere near being able to do that (especially since I can't even get the upstream code to install successfully). Using the open Radeon driver is great if that's what you want to do, and in the past I've been among those who would rather run the free driver because of all the advantages it provides by not being closed-source. But now I find myself wanting and needing Catalyst, and in Fedora 20 I'm unable to get it. If there were any advance warning, I would have NEVER upgraded from F19 to F20 and would have avoided new kernels until the situation was somehow resolved. I like freedom, but part of that is freedom of choice, and right now freedom of choice and the best technical solution are really lacking for AMD video in Fedora. I've seen some talk here and there about the lack of AMD Catalyst packaged for Fedora, but overall I hear a collective "meh" from the community. There's a lot to like about Fedora, and I'd love to stay with it, but the lack of this driver in the short term is really driving me away. Maybe the Linux kernel, Mesa, Xorg, or something else will improve performance on my hardware, but the promise of greatly improved performance right now in just about any other distribution makes it hard for me to stick with Fedora. If nobody cares, and nothing's going to change in terms of a packaged Catalyst, I'd sure like to know now. But as a formerly happy Fedora user, this is pretty much a deal-breaker for me. -- Steven Rosenberg http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog http://blogs.dailynews.com/click -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
