Yeah, i had a similar experience. I was messing around with a small Media Center/NAS hybrid running Debian, and it really, really wasn’t happy with the integrated GPU of the AMD A4 i was using, causing instability and tons of graphical glitches especially in video playback, which were not acceptable on a potential media center. My attempts to get help from the community as a linux noob that did not even have enough knowledge to know what commands i could use to get relevant information to add to my cry for help got me a lot of harsh replies before someone was nice enough two days later to help me out. We got it fixed together after a few rounds of replies, but my first impression was not very good.
Nowadays there are so many online resources available, and support boards often have basic information available about what information should be attached and HOW TO GET IT, which reduces friction a lot, and also makes the community a lot more accessible for new users.
causing instability and tons of graphical glitches especially in video playback
Flashbacks to me struggling to get the fglrx drivers working.
If you never got to experience the “joy” of that… There was a time long ago when getting graphics acceleration working with ATI/AMD GPUs on Linux needed proprietary drivers. It was a struggle, significantly worse than dealing with the Nvidia drivers today. Things improved so much when AMD released and upstreamed their modern open-source driver, around 10 years ago now.
Yeah, i had a similar experience. I was messing around with a small Media Center/NAS hybrid running Debian, and it really, really wasn’t happy with the integrated GPU of the AMD A4 i was using, causing instability and tons of graphical glitches especially in video playback, which were not acceptable on a potential media center. My attempts to get help from the community as a linux noob that did not even have enough knowledge to know what commands i could use to get relevant information to add to my cry for help got me a lot of harsh replies before someone was nice enough two days later to help me out. We got it fixed together after a few rounds of replies, but my first impression was not very good.
Nowadays there are so many online resources available, and support boards often have basic information available about what information should be attached and HOW TO GET IT, which reduces friction a lot, and also makes the community a lot more accessible for new users.
Flashbacks to me struggling to get the fglrx drivers working.
If you never got to experience the “joy” of that… There was a time long ago when getting graphics acceleration working with ATI/AMD GPUs on Linux needed proprietary drivers. It was a struggle, significantly worse than dealing with the Nvidia drivers today. Things improved so much when AMD released and upstreamed their modern open-source driver, around 10 years ago now.