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

[CrankyOldBugger]

To be honest, as far as Linux is concerned I've had nothing but bad luck
with AMD and ATI.  I've stopped buying either of them.

Conversely, I'm happy with my Intel laptop, with Nvidia GPU.  Other than
the occasional driver issue (avoid Nouveau), it's been good to me.


On Thu, 2 Mar 2017 at 12:49 Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> 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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