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

[B. S.]

Re: Tearing

- when you see that, look deeper.  From what I have seen, it seems that 
such usually only comes into play with video motion, including desktop 
effects, and particularly across monitors. i.e. Nothing I care about. I 
am no expert / YMMV. As far as I know, you're like me, no desktop 
effects, prefer Firefox*, many tabs, little or no video / editing.

You might also see whether you are using xinerama or not - multiple 
screens at different resolutions are unbearable without it. grep 
xinerama /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/*

Apparently just:
Section "ServerFlags"
   Option    "Xinerama" "true"
EndSection

is sufficient. (Recently added https://launchpad.net/~kubuntu-ppa 
backports to my 12.04 machine, lost X, found this, ... grumble ...)


I tend to agree with Cranky re Intel and (mostly) Nvidia. When I got my 
netbook Asus 1201N some years back, it seemed important to have hardware 
video acceleration in such underpowered machines. The machine would be 
unbearable without the nvidia and its hardware video acceleration.

Since software will first be optimized for intel, and we spend so many 
hours in front of the machines, I've yet to opt for a non-intel machine. 
I also put in as much memory as I can - although the cost is irritating, 
the speed increase over the lifetime of the machine is substantial.

Both of us well remember the initial video issues with Kubuntu 12.04 - 
since hardware is a moving target, there may be value in sticking with 
Intel / Nvidia.

Having said that, since Intel video got dual, and now triple-heading 
ability, and developers have spent much time getting software video 
speed up, Nvidia may be of little import - particularly if not on board. 
(Cost.) IIRC in my brief look at 16.04 (killed in favour of KDE / Debian 
Jessie) proprietary Nvidia drivers weren't even installable. (In favour 
of Nouveau, which I long ago gave up on in frustration. Nouveau is 
apparently much better now, but most happy with Intel video, less so 
with other variants.)

Although I hate hearing it, myself, how much is your time worth? (For 
CPU / video manufacturer candidate choices.) I've started thinking about 
it slightly differently - how much aggravation are you willing to put up 
with trying to get it to work non-out of the box?


Re: Tabs

- you might check out PaleMoon, a Firefox fork, originally intended, 
IIRC, to revert look and feel back to pre-Android (?) pre-Aurelius (?) 
desktop use. https://www.palemoon.org/ 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Moon_%28web_browser%29

Although Firefox is still kicking around, I won't go back to it / new 
personal installs don't get it.

You might also look into the tab suspending addons, as available. Speed 
increase / memory footprint difference has been astounding. On Chrome I 
use 'The Great Suspender' (dratted stupid unintuitive names!) 
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg

Pale Moon sometimes has Firefox addon compatibility issues - their site 
and forums point you to alternatives and workarounds where known. The 
only working equivalent to the addon above is 'BarTab Heavy' 
https://github.com/philikon/BarTab/wiki/FAQ - which I ended up 
uninstalling. Firefox may have better equivalents. Like I said the 
difference in speed and memory footprint is astonishing.

(Firefox under Wine, for, e.g. CTV, seems to work, too.)


On 03/02/2017 12:47 PM, Khalid Baheyeldin 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
>