"Nouveau and amdgpu were always barely working" — nah, you are spreading misleading information and lumping together completely unrelated projects at different

"Nouveau and amdgpu were always barely working" — nah, you are spreading misleading information and lumping together completely unrelated projects at different stages of development. Noveau has been almost close to usable at some point... Until Nvidia started the whole signed firmware nonsence. Then it quickly became intolerable due to Nvidia, supplying no signed firmware or heavily crippled firmware. These days you are actually better off using software renderer/llvmpipe (which at least might benefit from a powerful processor). "amdgpu" is a name of the modern AMD kernel driver, that replaced "radeon" driver. Both drivers were developed with direct help from ATI/AMD. Unlike it's older predecessor, current amdgpu versions include the "display core" code, that was designed to be shared between Linux and Windows AMD drivers (not sure, if that part has worked out yet). All Linux drivers for currently produced AMD cards are open-source, both kernel and userspace parts. AMD also has a "value-adding" package, that is based on their own userspace driver (which is open-source) and simply adds few closed-source components to it. "amdgpu" is not barely working — AFAIK, it is the only currently available AMD kernel driver, and it worked great for me, both 2D and 3D.