My response was that if you were looking for a distribution like RHEL but did not want to sign up for a RH Developer account to get access to RHEL, then Alma and Rocky would be the direct alternatives for enterprise-y distros for those that want long-term stability (a la Debian stable).
I tested the waters of daily driving FreeBSD back in the day to replace Windows, but eventually went back due to the lack of viable alternatives. I eventually switched to macOS and used that for a while. I’m now on Fedora as my daily driver for the past 4 months and don’t plan on going back. There are still some programs that I’ll boot up my MacBook Pro for, but that’s only for an hour or two a week at most.
I really liked macOS over Windows because it was still Unix-y at its core and WSL wasn’t yet a thing on Windows. Plus, I really disliked what Microsoft was doing with Windows 8 (and later 10).
I’ve only used OpenBSD as a dekstop for more than a fleeting moment and that was to just have fun on an iMac G3. I’ve deployed OpenBSD where it is best suited: network appliances that needed to be as secure and locked down as possible.
FreeBSD still has some work to become more of a desktop-friendly operating system, though the previous PC-BSD/TrueOS and the current GhostBSD definitely are close to being viable for day-to-day desktop use. The issue is application compatibility, as even the Linux compatibility layer isn’t 100%.
My biggest thing with macOS is how good the drag-and-drop functionality is. Couple that with having folders I can tab through pinned to the Dock and I feel like Sonic the Hedgehog zipping around the system.
I meant to ask you @skywalker71 , you posted a few weeks ago that you had trouble with the older 470 Nvidia driver and that you had better success with Mint.
Are you still running mint, or did you get your graphical card driver issues sorted out with Fedora, and if so, are you on the XFCE spin, KDE, Gnome or what?
How did you go about getting things working to your satisfaction with your older GT card?
Yes. With Mint, the driver for GT730 (470.xx) was easily installed but for other OS, including Fedora, it was a pain in the butt. Though the GT 730 driver was installed in Mint, it didn’t give the highest resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels which my monitor supports and there was and is no solution for that. You get what Nvidia thinks best, not what you should and I hate that. Why can’t I get the resolution which both the card and the monitor are capable of handling due to incapability of Nvidia developers or due to Nvidia’s thinking that this is not worth their time?! So, I changed my graphics card to AMD Sapphire Pulse RX 550 4GB DDR5 and it is recognised by the OS by default because AMD GPU drivers are embedded in Linux kernel.
I have left Mint due to a different issue. It couldn’t detect the USB 2.0 ports on my motherboard. I tested Mint, Debian 12, Pop OS, Peppermint and Fedora. Except Fedora, none of these distros could detect the USB 2.0 ports on my motherboard by default. Btw, I have a Gigabyte 970A-DS3P board.
I am using Fedora KDE spin because KDE has some advanced features out of the box like you can see the graphical download upload speed from the taskbar etc.
I had to upgrade my graphics card at some point. I would change it next year if everything would go well because its capabilities were limited. When it didn’t go as expected, I changed the card and probably will never use an Nvidia because Nvidia haven’t opened its source code to embed in Linux which AMD did and I use AMD processors and Radeon graphics card from the day I started assembling my own PC which is a very long time. Only for last few years, I was using this GT 730. But Davinci Resolve is not detecting the current RX 550 GPU as OpenCL is missing. I have to sort it out somehow.
I don’t think that I have a data centre. This article was published on July, 2024 and they have “assured” us that in future, they will release more ‘robust’ infrastructure for Linux kernel. What they didn’t mention that their ‘achievements’ and ‘releases’ are all focused towards their new ‘high-end GPUs’ the price of which we know, how ridiculous they are. So, older GPU holders, please throw your GPUs in the drain or do whatever Nvidia wants. Either ‘Nvidia-way or the drain-way’. So, thank you Nvidia. I will not bow down to you. Just like Intel and Microsoft, I put you Nvidia in my ‘ditched’ list and I will remain loyal to AMD which I am till date. Actually I do use AMD processors and GPUs for a very long time and I am very happy with AMD’s all products.
My experience with a RX 6600 XT and RTX 3060 Fedora 30-something was so drastically different that I’m content with never buying an AMD GPU for Linux again.
ROCm and AMDGPU-PRO OpenCL libs were the biggest PITAs (ROCm wasn’t “nicely” packaged back then like today, and AMDGPU-PRO libs needed some Mesa shim from a Copr advertised not to break stuff and still occasionally broke on Fedora updates). Which also reminds me of the Mesa VAAPI freeworld ordeal, which was bad-enough to make me drop adding RPM Fusion for several Fedora releases after that (showed a huge lack-of QA). And don’t get me started with PCVR with AMD; pre-RDNA3 is basically crap compared to anything NVIDIA with anything GPU encoding (Meta Quest, Pico, Vive Focus; aka mainstream headsets), and RDNA3 only exclusively has the questionable PAL-rewrite drivers 22.5.2+ available; last I heard Meta mid-2024 still didn’t officially support RDNA3 for encoder reasons.
NVIDIA was as-easy as adding RPM Fusion and installing like 5 packages for everything (GL, CUDA, CL, VDPAU), and perfect PCVR. And on my 3060 it worked fine with NVIDIA’s openGPU drivers on Fedora back then.
Friend, I am very new. In my thinking, playing with the Kernel needs more experince. May be in 2-3 years I will be able to do that. Am I right or my concept is wrong?
Thanks for the info. I will keep it in mind. But as I am not using my PC for gaming but only for photo editing and video editing stuff, I think I will be able to do that with some help. Yes, softwares like Davinci Resolve is giving a bit pain but it can be tamed by the help of experienced members like you. I have no shame on confessing that I know abolutely nothing about Linux. 2-3 months experience is nothing but a baby’s experience and as I am not a developer or a tinkerer or a distro-hopper, I don’t want to delve into Linux system. I am mainly a user who wants to use Linux instead of Windows to do works like website designing and developing, photo editing, video editing, audio editing and browsing and do some billing and maintaining word and excel files… that’s all and I will go only that much deep which it takes to make these things work, like installing AMD GPU PRO drivers to make Resolve acknowledging my RX 550 … not everybody can afford a 6600 XT or they require it. Also there is no acknowledgable OPENCL in the system for my RX 550 because ‘GPU Viewer’ is not showing any device in OPENCL section as well as Davinci Resolve. Another problem I am facing which is, Kdenlive is giving errors of ‘Unsupported video codec: libx264’. Same for libx265. I don’t know how to install them. But I am hopeful that these problems will be solved with the help of the community.
Good luck with that. I bought a RX580 just 2-3 years ago because I couldn’t resist an 8GB card that seemed to match nicely with my 12-year-old desktop for only $89. I should have done more homework. ROCM (the open source OpenCL from AMD) is too new and doesn’t support cards as old as ours, or didn’t. I ended up using the open source graphics driver and the proprietary legacy opencl driver from AMD to get Darktable running snappy for a year or so.
Then AMD stopped supporting, or making available the legacy opencl driver, and I didn’t notice until a kernel update broke my opencl setup, and I haven’t had opencl since.
So, if you do find a way to get opencl working with geriatric cards like ours, please let me know.
Yes. ROCM doesn’t support old cards like my RX550 or yours RX580. But I think the proprietary AMDGPU driver will make it work. Besides, here @Espionage724 and @boredsquirrel have advised me to use the LTS kernel but I need to know something related to this. Anyway, if I succeed about which I am very much positive, I will definitely let you know and post here the detailed process. Thanks for the info you have shared.
That didn’t work for me. The entire reason AMD had the -legacy drivers was because the current drivers didn’t support OpenCL on old cards. But, here’s hoping it works for you. I’ve done a clean re-install since the last time I tried, so I’m willing to try again.
That would be like having the heaven in hand. Linux has much more reputation of being able to revive old computers, among people like me who know very little and transitioning to Linux for the first time and we expected that this ‘revival’ includes support for all the hardwares embedded and not embedded with it and to some extent it is true. But, if people like me, who don’t want to go with Microsoft because they can’t afford to spend 1,00,000 in local currency for a new PC, turn to Linux to keep using their existing MS-rejected PC and find out that their precious GPU or WiFi adapter is not supported by Linux, they would feel total helpless because they don’t have any other way. So, when developing an update, Linux developers should keep it in mind that there are more people with not so latest hardware than the latest hardware owners. Because if these no-so-latest-hardware-owners could spend that much money, 80% of them I think would go with MS because till date Windows is the most hassle-free OS regarding drivers and latest pro softwares. Take my case. I had a GT730 GPU which was working fine in Windows (if I use it again, it will still work just fine) and I had zero issue to run all the latest video editing, sound editing, photo editing softwares. Even Davinci Resolve was also working fine. Then because of MS, I decided to use Linux and after much research, I found Fedora should be my OS. Great. I installed Fedora in a separate SSD and then found out that making a GPU work as it works in Windows, is a nightmare for a newbie. Then with lots of help and lots of research I installed the 470.xx driver for my GT730 and then I saw that it is giving 1600 x 900 px resolution on a 1920 x 1080 px monitor. But Davinci Resolve and Kdenlive recognized it and didn’t had any issue. So, being dissatisfied, I bought this AMD RX550 which I could afford and delightfully I noticed that AMD GPU has been recognised by the system i.e. Fedora 40 without installing any driver. But Davinci is not recognising this card and Kdenlive is giving unsupported video codecs: libx264 and libx265 errors on Fedora 41.
Someone in another forum, told me Fedora needs the latest hardware to work without problem which is disheartening. Because, only 5% of the world population has the 95% of wealth and I am not one of them. I cannot afford to throw away my new RX 550 card and by a 6600 XT or newer.
So, my earnest request to the Linux developers, please keep us in mind. We are the majority and if you want to make Linux successful as a Desktop OS, you have to tap our desktops with not-so-latest-hardwares. Microsoft just did that with Windows 95 and the rest was history.
