KDE KWin May Drop Support For AMD Catalyst Drivers 148
An anonymous reader writes "The KWin window manager maintainer for KDE is looking at removing the legacy OpenGL 1.0 renderer from the KWin code-base due to the costs of supporting legacy hardware. This means dropping support for non-GL2+ graphics cards, which are all over six years old, but in the process would mean that for now there is no longer any support for the AMD Catalyst driver on the KDE desktop. Due to driver bugs, AMD's proprietary Catalyst software only works well with the GL1 renderer even though their latest hardware supports OpenGL 4."
Losing the old PC advantage (Score:4, Interesting)
6 year old PC's can still run XP, and once XP support is withdrawn, they will have to either sell off those PC's or move to Linux
By withdrawing support for old PC's, they are losing out on a decent amount of the already tiny marketshare Linux has in the PC market
So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
I had more than my share of problems with the Catalyst driver. Switched to the radeonhd driver in its infancy, and got better results, albeit more crashes. It quickly matured. Later I switched to the radeon driver, once it had reasonably mature support for my HD3870 or whatever it is. The performance is great, the stability is great, and I expect that compositing will continue to work.
Basically, AMD has helped the open-source community to develop this driver sufficiently for it to take over as far as I'm concerned.
No good choices here. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem comes in with the fact that the open source drivers don't support everything. I seem to be in a real minority -- I really use Linux for all my desktop stuff, except playing the odd game. All my music, movies, everything I do from my linux laptop generally. The open source drivers won't allow me to do all the stuff that I do -- mainly, I won't be able to watch high def movies -- no hardware decoding support. There probably never will be either, without using catalyst. Do not also forget that since I'm on a laptop, I've got concerns regarding my power usage too on occasion, and the open source drivers consume a lot more juice. So the open source drivers *I would much rather use otherwise* don't support all the features that I use frequently. So this is bad for me, at least. My laptop isn't old, either -- its video card is a Mobility Radeon 5870, still pretty spiffy if you ask me.
Also, the desktop effects do more than just look pretty, a number of handy features for organizing windows and seeing what apps you have running require it.
So yeah, I just can't see this making AMD finally bring their drivers into the last century. Speaking as a Militant Linux Zealot who aggressively hates and seeks the destruction of everyone who doesn't wholly agree with me -- The linux desktop numbers are fairly low, I personally think they are higher than most people think -- but thats still a low number. Then cut that into a third or so which is the KDE desktop people. Thats one third of a small number ... I doubt AMD gives a shit. I see what the developer is saying here, but it seems that his choices are 1) Irritate a lot of users who use AMD graphics, probably lose a number of them who use the catalyst features, 2) Continue to support code for the sake of AMD being kind of a shit company.
I'd rather not get screwed by this, so I hope he continues to support GL1 for now, and maybe we can find another way to push AMD into updating their drivers because I don't think he'll get the response from them that he thinks he will.