The amdgpu drivers in Linux are fantastic these days. Works out of the box with most hardware. No proprietary binaries needed, other than the firmware blobs. AMD is doing a really solid job of supporting their Linux user base.
AMD drivers have an OS-independent hardware abstraction library at the core and they "only" have to adapt it to different systems: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/pal
No multi-GPU support (at least 2 years ago, using the binary drivers), no AMF support on Linux, and couldn't get multi-display support on a split screen. AMD is fail for me...
Excellent is a stretch. It works for things they support. Look at optimus and wayland for instance. Also, they restrict nouveau from working by signing blobs and enforcing checks. And this is years after Linus flipping the bird and other repeated requests.
Optimus was the single most pain in the ass thing I have ever experienced in linux. Never again, am I going to run linux on an optimus machine with Bumblebee.
I don't know, I upgraded to 18.10 and my XPS's brightness control doesn't work. The Prime switchy thing can't change cards without a reboot, and if the screen goes to sleep between switching cards and rebooting, it never comes up again. Actually, with 18.10, it never comes up again anyway. I have a whole host of issues with nVidia cards, my next card is going to be AMD.
That's not the point. The switching issue at least is present on 18.04 as well. Basically, ubuntu changed the mechnanism from bbswitch in 16.04 to a different one in 18.04. The 18.04 one is buggy and inferior at the moment.
Their driver is really behind in terms of supporting newer libdrm features. It's also not well integrated in the ecosystem. They basically don't talk to the other Linux graphics devs.
You can get native GPU buffers via enabling zero copy rasterizer in flags and passing --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers via chromium-flags or as an argument.
They work on ChromeOS the same way they do on desktop Linux and I've been using them for months without issue.
The Chromium in Fedora's standard repo is built with it, and when I run it chrome://gpu does say video hardware acceleration is enabled. But at least with a handful of youtube videos, it doesn't matter, still uses 200%+ CPU, same as Chrome (no acceleration), laptop still gets hot and fans still run.
I haven't been following that bug, but a couple of things. Did you ignore-blacklists ? If you do ignore-blacklists, it overrides some stuff, but not everything. Also, the about:gpu page is not entirely accurate (particularly after ignore-blacklists) from what I remember. I think you should play a video and go to chrome://media-internals to figure out which path it is using. There have also been patches to enable acceleration for intel, but not merged upstream. So if you got a patched version, or your distro did that for you, it could also work. Finally, it works on chromeOS, which also uses Intel hardware, but that's because google supports chromeOS.
