Part of me wonders if this is deliberate. No graphics drivers that are useful, no games. No games, no Linux desktop.
Why? AMD has no stake or interest in what OS you game on, they're just looking to sell their hardware. They get no benefit from enabling or pushing a migration to Linux unless they can steal customers from nVidia/Intel that way, which seems highly unlikely. You don't need a conspiracy to explain why companies don't do things that don't benefit them.
They get no benefit from enabling or pushing a migration to Linux unless they can steal customers from nVidia/Intel that way, which seems highly unlikely.
I get the sentiment of this, but there are several scenarios where pushing people to Linux (and getting existing Linux users) would benefit them. First that comes to my mind is that users that build systems from scratch at home overlap quite a bit with Linux users, and most of those users go for best bang for the buck, which has traditionally been AMD. You can also get more enterprise-level features from AMD in consumer level cpus (ex. ECC memory support; ex. latest features (sata, usb3, etc) come to AMD motherboards first - at least traditionally). Take into account the cpu distribution in dell/hp/etc systems, which is almost all intel, and I think it makes sense to make sure their market share where they are strongest stays strong. As you implied though, there's plenty of reason to focus on the wintel market at all costs.
Re: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:0)
Part of me wonders if this is deliberate. No graphics drivers that are useful, no games. No games, no Linux desktop.
What Linux needs is something like Apple's Metal, an API to help with performance.
Re: (Score:2)
Part of me wonders if this is deliberate. No graphics drivers that are useful, no games. No games, no Linux desktop.
Why? AMD has no stake or interest in what OS you game on, they're just looking to sell their hardware. They get no benefit from enabling or pushing a migration to Linux unless they can steal customers from nVidia/Intel that way, which seems highly unlikely. You don't need a conspiracy to explain why companies don't do things that don't benefit them.
Re:settled cannon for about a decade now (Score:2)
They get no benefit from enabling or pushing a migration to Linux unless they can steal customers from nVidia/Intel that way, which seems highly unlikely.
I get the sentiment of this, but there are several scenarios where pushing people to Linux (and getting existing Linux users) would benefit them. First that comes to my mind is that users that build systems from scratch at home overlap quite a bit with Linux users, and most of those users go for best bang for the buck, which has traditionally been AMD. You can also get more enterprise-level features from AMD in consumer level cpus (ex. ECC memory support; ex. latest features (sata, usb3, etc) come to AMD motherboards first - at least traditionally). Take into account the cpu distribution in dell/hp/etc systems, which is almost all intel, and I think it makes sense to make sure their market share where they are strongest stays strong.
As you implied though, there's plenty of reason to focus on the wintel market at all costs.