I bought a 5700 after my GTX 970 died and I wanted to play games and do some game programming.
I waited to buy it after it had been out for two months and I could get a good 3rd party cooler.
I had to wait another two weeks for support to get into Manjaro (Arch). The 5700 series Navi cards had several dependencies. Mesa 19.2.1 (19.2.0 was not a production release), LLVM 9.0, Linux 5.3, anddddd... a linux-firmware pkg update.
Navi had been out for almost 2.5 months at this point...
Windows 7 just required an AMD Radeon graphics driver to be installed. And, I could install it, justed booted into VESA mode, download it, install, reboot.
Nvidia had been having issues with elements flashing on their closed source Linux drivers. An issue my 970 had in abundance. Which is why I went AMD, better value and I can use proper open source drivers.
Recent AMD hardware support is really pitful for new Linux users. Especially since I usually recommend Ubuntu, which is often using much older mesa and Linux kernels than Arch distros. The 2000 series APU launches were an absolute joke (although Windows users had similar issues).
Windows 10's rolling updates has it's issues (Orange Screenshots). But I recently installed it to my laptop, wifi worked out of box w/o updated. Windows Update complained about Intel drivers not being properly installed when it tried to install, rebooted, everything worked fine as far I could tell.
I bought AMD to support their support of open standards (Freesync) and their open source software contributions (Nvidia didn't open source PhysX until AMD released it's open source equivalent). AMD recently open sourced their AI mage anti-aliasing tech for their cards which were ported to all cards by the community.
AMD needs to do a better job of getting their open source drivers into mesa and the kernel. Intel tries to get their initial support at least a year into the kernel (source Phoronix).
From what I hear, Ubuntu 19.10 didn't update their linux-firmware pkgs for their ISOs so you can't boot with the 5700 series Navi cards with Ubuntu 19.10... let alone for the rumored 5600 mainstream Navi cards coming out soon.
My Asus Netbook, which was bought with GNU/Linux nowadays still doesn't have the same DirectX 11 feature parity level, hand hardware video decoding, that the previous proprietary AMD drivers provided, so is the beauty of the new open source ones.
Meanwhile Asus has provided updated DirectX 11 drivers to all Windows generations since Windows 7.
> I had to wait another two weeks for support
This situation is completely unacceptable. I hope you called Manjaro and asked to speak to a manager to get a refund on your free operating system.
Either it’s comparable or it’s “deal with it’s problems because it’s free”. It can’t be both.
"Hey, I have a problem with your product..."
"It was FREE! Why are you complaining!?"
--Why Linux Desktop will never be a serious contender, part 12.
And, if you actually read my post.
You would have known I blamed AMD for not properly supporting the card I paid for 2.5 months after launch.
Linux is even listed as a supported OS on the box. (Which is awesome btw!)
It's the basic trade off of short term vs long term reward.
Using closed source is like having a diet of candy. Great in small amounts, but bad if you are past 5 years old. And ridiculous if you are writing articles to defend it.
Or, you know, forever. The number of things the Linux Desktop community is actively hostile to that could make computing life so much simpler is ridiculous. Portable applications? Relative icon paths in .desktop files? A standardized set of base libraries developers can rely on being present? Linux Desktop cares not for such things. If you don't want to do things their way, fuck you, that's their motto. Then they wonder why people keep choosing other OSs.
I definitely feel your pain (I can't count the number of times I have run into UX issues on various Linux distros, and in search for a fix/answer find many people that ran into the exact same issue but find that the maintainer has stubbornly refused to consider changing or fixing it), but really? If you don't like something on Linux, you can fork and fix it yourself.* If you don't like something on Windows or macOS, it's Microsoft and Apple that are telling you 'fuck you, deal with it.'
* Whether or not doing so is feasible is a different story..
I'm still using Linux as well, but I've been really impressed by the stability of the LTSC Win10. Even fewer problems than the recent iterations of MacOS, in my experience. It's worth considering especially if you need access to commercial software like Excel or Adobe CC products.
That said, something caught my eye: he was spending a lot of time tweaking the Linux UI instead of working. This was me fifteen or twenty years ago: wasting tons of time tweaking things. Now, I use Pop Linux as is in my System76 laptop and before that for years I just accepted the default Ubuntu setup. Good enough.
When I use Windows, there's a lot of "update work" to do that ends up distracting me. Updating WSL Ubuntu, updating chocolatey, checking individual apps for updates, checking windows for updates, etc. I end up being more focused when I'm using Linux.
With my daily back-up, and a couple of scripts, I can completely re-install my system from an absolute disaster to up-and-running normally within about an hour or an hour and a half.
I never had OP’s experiences with Mint, so in that regard he’s generalizing. Like Christianity and its many denominations, it REALLY depends on the distro.
Isn't this person the CEO of Apple according to you know who.
So we had to look elsewhere to run UNIX at home.
Nowadays Linux ABI is more valuable than plain POSIX source compatibility, hence WSL. Which by the way Windows wasn't the first to go through this route.
Yes, Windows has gotten far better in recent years; then again, there have been great tools available for it for a while, like ConEmu and it's derivative Cmdr, so when it was recently announced that Windows 10 does SSH I smirked because I've been doing that -- and Vim and other things -- from Cmdr for years.
It gives me the same keybjndings I want everywhere. Linux now feels the same regardless of what distro I’m using, and it’s just the way I like it now.
It’s easy to get suckered in to ricing you’re environment, but you get tired of it eventually and just copy/paste the config around.
Windows scares me at this point, it doesn’t have a nice timing window manger and I inevitably lose what I’m working on in a pile of windows.
