It is, yes. But I hate things being half-assed. I don't demand an equal performance to Windows, I just want to have enough support to not have to repair my system every single time I'm updating kernel or Radeon driver. I could bare having lower performance for sake of having a set of hardware support that does not wreak havoc on my system every time configuration slightly changes. Even that aside, why do their users have to look around tech-blogs or fora for support instead of having even the token troubleshooting guide on the AMD website even for distributions that they allegedly support? Or hell, give me an uninstall script that actually works 100% of a time and restores the fucking configuration to the one before attempted update. I can settle for that as a fix for botched updates. It would take as little as ask some guys on tech support forum for permission to share their (oftentimes incredibly competent and well-written!) guides. Maybe that's me not getting the intricacies of the legal system and business in general, but I don't know why can't they at least contract a few guys to play around on some hardware and system configurations and catch typical errors that follow update. It's what Good Old Games, an equal 'small fish' when compared to Steam, does and their quality is quite a lot higher on average. Yeah, smaller market share, smaller expectations, team sizes etc… but it does not stop them from doing a pretty damn good job. Post not sponsored by GoG :P. Anyway, I'm kinda pissed as you can clearly see, but I don't think that I'm demanding something impossible. I mean, really: many of my complaints would be moot if only I would not have to restore pre-update/pre-installation configuration by hand.
Not that waiting longer is ever a good solution but with Vulkan coming out/being fully realized I would be hopeful of more stable drivers coming in the near future (1-2 years). In the mean time you could always dual boot with Windows so at least you have an environment where you don't have to worry about system compatibility. I definitely don't like being forced into Windows to play games either but at least you don't have to deal with the occasional hiccup.
1. That Vulcan sounds interesting, do you mean this? See, it does seem promising but your 1-2 years prognosis I've heard last year :/. Either way, it does seem like a bit of a game changer if it would actually work and deliver to expectations. 2. I don't really play games, at least ones that don't run on either Wine or DosBox. What I need is the OpenCL capability which leaves me almost without options when it comes to GPGPU programming other than getting proprietary driver. If you know anything about getting that without them, I'm all ears! 3. Dual boot is what I was considering for a moment, but I have zero experience with Windows (don't think that's any "point of honour" for me, but no-one in my family was using Windows. Debian was literally my first OS and I never had drive or opportunity to switch to Windows). On one hand, I could give it a try since I don't have any classes until October. On another hand, I have enough troubleshooting for a considerable length of time and I don't know if learning new system would fly with me at the moment. Do you have any advice or tips on that one? How does OpenCL access work on Windows if you happen to have experience with it. Thanks!
Yep, that Vulkan API is what I was talking about. Only reason I'd be more hopeful than not in this situation is that games are coming out (AAA titles) that are utilizing this API and are working wonderfully on AMD cards. But that's not really what you're looking for. Unfortunately I don't know about OpenCL but if keifermiller is right, it doesn't seem like much of a hassle to get installed on a Windows partition. Honestly going to Windows shouldn't be much of a pain for you. I think it would be similar to going from Android to iOS. With Android you can more or less do things how you want, make it how you want and with iOS it may look pretty and work well most of the time but you have to do things their way. That's oversimplified admittedly but it's more or less what I have noticed most when switching between the two.
My experience with OpenCL on windows is: Install the the AMD drivers, then install the AMD OpenCL SDK. Done. I only played around with it for a bit though. I'd use it more, but the Blender GPU rendering doesn't have all of the shaders I use written for OpenCL. Gallium/Mesa are working on opensource OpenCL support, but it wasn't ready when I checked it out half a year ago.