Reading the thread it seems this all happened a while ago:
> The world of 2014 Linux graphics drivers was not a friendly place. We absolutely encountered issues where some driver revisions only worked on certain distros, and AFAIK we did not use anything specific to a Linux distro.
About the same time Chromium project found a lot of GFX bugs and created a lot of workarounds but when I disabled all of them now in 2019, they don't seem to exist. Anecdotal experience but I think things have improved and it wouldn't be this hard any longer.
I first started using linux in 1998 with RedHat 5.2, installed from a CD off a magazine.
At almost any point in my time using linux there was something "temporarily broken" that would eventually get fixed/improve some time down the road (modems, sound cards, wifi, power-management modes, GPUs, etc), at which point it didn't take long for something new to break.
There are of course those calm eras of peace in between but anecdotally it never seemed to last long until the next nuisance.
Ha, I started with Slackware around the same time (downloaded over 2 days to about 10 floppies).
When I got bored of fixing stuff I moved to Ubuntu. It pretty much just works now except when I break it (which is often). Point being I could just install and run with zero issues.
yes it's not as bad as it used to be, but installing ubuntu on any random laptop (i.e. not one bought specifically because it's known to be well supported by linux) is still a crapshoot of at least something minor not working 100% (like a touch screen or some other "weird" feature).
It is rarely something truly fundamental but it happened just often enough for me not to want to bother and just pay 2x for a MacBook Pro every 5 years (a trivial expense for a well-compensated software developer).
AMD first started with open source graphics with the radeon kernel module and pre-SI drivers around ~2009. It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012. It was less AMDGPU being a big deal in 2016 and more that was when Mesa hit approximate parity with the latest OpenGL.
> It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012.
Which meant that people who wanted to play games were stuck with the proprietary fglrx and all the compatibility and other problems that come with a proprietary driver on Linux.
The big advance of AMDGPU was that it was a usable open source driver that made it into the kernel tree, which meant that kernel changes would no longer break the driver people were actually using because drivers in the kernel tree get patched when the kernel changes.
