What's the current AMD Situation on Linux?

[Zarathustra[H]]

Sorry for the bump! Has this changed at all? I knew about using most recent kernels (recent stable kernel, at least) and install MESA. If I can ever build a recent gen. computer in the near future - my plan is a Z690/i5-12600K and RX 6600 XT (providing I can find one that isn't too overpriced). From what I hear, the RX 6500 XT (or whatever it's called) is gimped/crippled so I would rather go 6600 XT or GTX 3060/Ti.

Fedora, Open SUSE, Manjaro and Ubuntu (*with upgraded kernel/PPA), Debian (Testing/Sid) would seem to be the distros to try (with up-to-date kernel version and Mesa)?

I'm not sure what you are looking for to have changed, but AMD open source kernel/MESA drivers are really quite good.

You just want to do your best to have has recent ones as you can. For me In Mint that means using Ubuntu's Hardware Enablement Stack (hwe) to add the latest kernels and Xorg (which brings me to 5.13) and as suggested previously in this thread I have also added the kisak mesa PPA to get some of the latest mesa stuff.

It has been completely stable for me. I can't speak to the other distributions, as I don't use them. You can probably get better performance from one of the more bleeding edge distros (arch/manjaro/Debian SID/Fedora Rawhide/Suse Tumbleweed) than anything in the regular stable debian/ubuntu/mint line, but when you do you might be trading stability for performance, as the debian/ubuntu line gets a literal shit ton of testing before release.

In fact, if gaming is your focus, arch or manjaro are probably the way to go. I see them mentioned more than other distributions in linux gaming circles, so I am guessing that if you need gaming help it will be easier to get it for those distributions.

Only issue I have had all of this time is a weird flickering for a few seconds after waking my screens from sleep, but it goes away very quickly and has been nothing but a very short cosmetic annoyance. I havent seen this reported by anyone else, so it may be something specific to my setup.

All of that said, I don't play any games in Linux, so, I can't speak to that.

I still think the general consensus is that for linux gaming, AMD open source is the way to go.

Nvidia's Binary blob drivers are probably the more stable and solid solution, but they aren't as focused on game performance. I tend to think of them as more of a professional solution.