Drivers & Software

[cryofreeze666]

i am currently trying to decide which o.s. i should go with next, free bsd, or debian12.  my problem is i cant find drivers for either listed when i search the radeon rx 6800 (nope not an xt).  are there any drivers for any program besides red hat, suse or ubuntu? have 3 cards i'm trying to use the radeon, a rtx 3060 ti, and a 1050 ti.  it will annoy me if i have to go back to windows because i have multiple cards from different companies.  i am really hating windows right now.

[bluesadam]

On Linux you do not need to install AMD drivers. They come bundled with the kernel.

I would advise doing some more research before jumping ships. Looks like you're pretty much in the dark as to how to use Linux based OS.

[cryofreeze666]

   so why does amd supply red hat, ubuntu, and suse drivers?  more research before jumping ship?  i think 20+ years of windows experience is enough research to say windows is getting worse not better.   i've done my research.  now is the time i learn by going into the places on another o.s where i don't belong, messing up the system then either fix it, or reinstall it.  same way i learned windows, the fastest most headache ridden way to learn.  but you definately know the system afterward.

   i was told that in order to crypto mine you needed the drivers for better, more efficient gpu ussage.  just built this comp in the last 6 months, don't care if i have to reinstall operating systems, hell, win10 with the update downloads took about 45 minutes.  debian took less time than that.  both were installed from disk. 

[bluesadam]

AMDs proprietary drivers in the AMD website do not work as well as the open-source drivers integrated into Linux kernel. In general you will have worse gaming and overall performance as well as worse compatibility. Don't make it confuse you, the open source drivers are ALSO made by AMD. In fact, proprietary drivers work on top of the linux integrated drivers.

As far as I know, proprietary AMD drivers for linux are only used for very specific features like ROCm support.

[cryofreeze666]

   i cant see amd making proprietary drivers that don't work and open source that do, maybe folks aren't uninstalling drivers properly before installing new drivers.  hell it doesn't make much sense that they wouldn't be the same drivers, if amd did create the open source drivers.  ran across the problem in windows alot when friends would by off brand cards, they didn't fully uninstall so you ended up searching for folders that shouldn't be there after the uninstall.

[christoph2005]

Your best bet (IMO) is to pick the OS that is "officially supported" by your specific card, for the usecases that you intend to use:
OpenGL (basically works automatically with linux)
Vulkan (you need to figure it out)
OpenCL (you need this for most crypto mining and also need to figure it out)
ROCm (seems to be needed for most AI stuff like stable diffusion/LLVM support; you might also need this if you ever want to try out zluda (cuda for amd; not supported) I'm certain that in the not-to-distant-future this will probably be needed to do some certain types of crypto mining; this seems to be a "super scientific computing library" similar to OpenCL, and it includes OpenCL as a small part of it.)
VDPAU (Just found out about this today. There are directions to install this if you install the Mesa official 3rd party PPA for most up-to-date (OpenGL?) driver support. Apparently there are ASIC chips in the GPU specifically for "video decoding" which can dramatically improve video playback in certain applications; Like watching 4k videos on youtube with less stuttering/freezing; This might also be a very necessary video decoding driver support if you're doing a lot of video editing and need smooth playback during editing video files (I'm not entirely sure if it does that, but it probably does))

To install the most up-to-date Mesa drivers from Mesa, use the following (on Ubuntu):

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade

You might get better support for the latest MESA/OpenGL/OpenCL(rusticl(newest), not clover(older))/(vulkan?) with the latest ubuntu 24.04, as that's the "minimum requirement, from the MESA team"

However if you want ROCm support you'll probably have to use the "AMD officially supported OS"

Either way there doesn't seem to be a great solution to these problems yet, AFAIK.

I'm certain that the easist/best way to support all the driver features that you probably want is probably just to use the windows stuff, but even that's apparently not a guarantee.