[kwlug-disc] AMD Laptops and Radeon with Ubuntu?

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

So, I am typing this from my trusted Toshiba that has a BIOS dated
March 2009. It has been performing adequately, specially after the
spinning drive was replaced with an SSD, and the memory upgraded to
the maximum.

It even became noticeably faster when I upgraded from Kubuntu 14.04 to 16.04.

The only complaint is the amount of memory. Obviously, opening so many
tabs in Firefox eats up memory fast, and I have been culling the old
ones. But once I fire up other memory intensive applications I see
that swap starts to build up. Programs like GIMP, Okular with many
PDFs open, ...etc.

Consequently, I am looking into upgrading the laptop with one that has
a larger amount of RAM.

Here is an example laptop with 12GB of RAM, and a decent CPU (between
most Intel i5s, and i7s). An SSD in that laptop would be all that is
required.

http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/lenovo-lenovo-15-6-laptop-black-amd-a12-9700p-1tb-hdd-12gb-ram-windows-10-english-80st001nus/10539714.aspx

I have used Ubuntu Server LTS on AMD desktop type machines, and it
works perfectly, but no GUI. All ssh.

For the graphics part, searching in Google provides confusing results.
Some report 'tearing', others point to new open source drivers,
...etc. and I can't conclude something concrete on the state of
affairs.

So the questions are:
1. Any one here with experience with AMD laptops running Linux?

2. What about the Radeon graphics cards that are built in on these
laptops? Are they fully supported by current distros (equivalent to
16.04 Ubuntu and derivatives?)

Thanks
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
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