> AMD Catalyst drop support for my 1 year old cheap Laptop
My advice is: Unless you're running a qualified application on a workstation GPU, do not use Catalyst (or whatever they're calling it this year). It is almost always more finnicky. Mesa has the best performance, and the most meaningful features for OpenGL, Vulkan, and D3D9 for any any GCN 1 or later (and probably r600 or later, but I don't have personal experience with that) GPU. AMD staffs people to maintain Mesa, including for GPUs they do not support their proprietary driver on; and if you're running a fresh/rolling-release distro, you'll tend to have a great out-of-the-box experience with Mesa.
Thanks for the response, my story about Catalyst was very old. I was trying to explain to some new Linux people that AMD was terrible a few year back. So I bought a new laptop and in 1 year Catalyst dropped support for the GPU in that laptop forcing me to only run distributions with old enough Xorg because the open source drivers were bad at that time.
I know that now AMD open source is better and my new computer will probably run an AMD CPU and an AMD GPU but until my current PC gets outdated I will have to continue use my NVIDIA 970 which is still a decent card for cashual gaming
My advice is: Unless you're running a qualified application on a workstation GPU, do not use Catalyst (or whatever they're calling it this year). It is almost always more finnicky. Mesa has the best performance, and the most meaningful features for OpenGL, Vulkan, and D3D9 for any any GCN 1 or later (and probably r600 or later, but I don't have personal experience with that) GPU. AMD staffs people to maintain Mesa, including for GPUs they do not support their proprietary driver on; and if you're running a fresh/rolling-release distro, you'll tend to have a great out-of-the-box experience with Mesa.