It's a Linux issue and it's why it's stuck at such non-factor marketshare for consumer desktops and it's why both Hardware Manufacturers and Softare Developers (Game Studios, Adobe, etc.) refuse to port their proprietary applications (which blow any of that F/OSS crap out of the water) to Linux.Įveryone seen Corel fail with WordPerfect, Borland Fail with Kylix, Loki, etc. Solaris fixed that probably before Linux existed, so it is certainly not a general *NIX issue. It's the only Operating System with such terrible backward and forward compatibility. I wonder why they're still in terrible shape. There are enough Linux fanbois to do that.
We don't have time filing bug reports, and we certainly don't want to "waste hardware" to debug broken or performance regressive device drivers for the Linux distrobutions. The Linux distros are billing their distributions are production ready, when they are filled with Pre-Alpha to Beta-level applications, drivers, services, whatever. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. unless we use it and post our bugs it will never be any better for us ati guys and if we do this the open source drivers will be fixed before our hardware becomes obsolete." Reply to Kyle: "Instead of posting about how angry we are here we should be using the new ati drivers from the open source community. Besides, the newest version also supports DRI (direct rendering infrastructure) with many of the cards.
The free radeonhd driver that the community has greatly improved, mainly through AMD's publishing of reference documentation, supports all cards in 2D mode, including compositing. Owners of the cards listed who want to run a current Linux distro shouldn't worry too much about switching drivers, however. Thus the upcoming releases from Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva are expected to support the new AMD driver only, at least for the time being. The Linux version, however, supports only distros released before February 2009 that have the older X.org. The new legacy driver supports the following graphics cards (including Mobile and All-in-Wonder variants): Now choosing to order the older graphics cards on the AMD homepage returns a notice that they moved to a legacy driver support structure.
Meanwhile AMD has released the 9.4 driver, which also supports Ubuntu 9.04. The AMD chipmaker reported in March that with the release of the Catalyst 9.4 driver they wanted to discontinue support for the Linux and Windows R300/400/500 cards and focus on the new generation instead.