Users are recommended to use the open source drivers

Dec 8, 2016 23:00 GMT  ·  By

openSUSE developer Bruno Friedmann informed the community of the openSUSE Linux operating system about the fact that he's planning to remove the old ATI/AMD Catalyst (also known as fglrx) proprietary graphics drivers.

Every Linux user that has a PC with an AMD Radeon GPU, be it discrete or dedicated, knows by now that AMD failed to update its AMD Catalyst proprietary graphics drivers to work with recent X.Org Server and Linux kernel releases. In fact, it's been a year since AMD/ATI Catalyst received a new version for Linux distros.

It's true that AMD currently works on its next-generation AMDGPU-PRO graphics driver for Linux, and the latest release that launched today, versioned 16.50, appears to work on the 64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 Service Pack 2 operating systems, on which OpenSuSE Leap 42.2 is based.

But the problem with the AMDGPU-PRO driver is that it doesn't provide support for the AMD Radeon graphics cards that were supported through the now deprecated AMD Catalyst graphics driver, which openSUSE engineers have hoped to implement in the openSUSE Leap 42.2 distribution.

"We had the hope of getting it working for Leap 42.2 in October, but except freezing kernel and X.Org, you will not get what you would expect: a stable X.Org session," said Bruno Friedmann. "If someone wants to break its computer, it’s still possible to pick the last files and try it by yourself, but the repository will never contain it for 42.2."

fglrx is now a dead horse, says dev

That being said, the fglrx is now a dead horse, which means that it has been removed from the openSUSE Leap or Tumbleweed software repositories and won't make a comeback, never. If you're still running openSUSE Leap 42.1 and you need the fglrx driver, the openSUSE devs recommend you not to upgrade to 42.2.

Of course, that doesn't mean your AMD graphics card is not supported in openSUSE. It is, by the open source AMDGPU or Radeon drivers that are shipping with the latest Mesa 3D Graphics Library release, which was recently updated in Tumbleweed. And, for those with newer AMD GPUs, there's the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 driver.