I just installed Jaunty Jackalope on my old Hasee (Chinese brand) laptop and decided to check out what ATI had to offer for Linux. I got on my favorite site for Ubuntu info and did some searches. I came up with this thread that starts off by stating how wonderful ATI's new Catalyst Control Center version 9.3 is in Linux and how many issue's it has fixed. I got kinda of excited (in a geeky way) and decided to rush over to AMD/ATI's driver download pages, where I downloaded the 81MB file. Jaunty Jackalope was released in mid/late April, so I figured this ATI driver, released on March 26, 2009, would surely have support for Ubuntu, arguably the worlds most popular Linux distribution, newest release (especially since there were public beta's available at the time this driver was released)... boy was I wrong.

Not only is ATI discontinuing support for my Mobility Radeon graphics card, they are also making drivers that are out-dated before they are released. After doing some extensive research (in Google), I found that the problem is ATI made this driver/software for an old version of Xorg. Ubuntu, on the other hand, being the relatively progressive OS that it is, moved on to the most current stable version available.

Granted, I said my laptop is old, but by old, I mean 3 years old. My desktop, on the other hand, is ancient at 8 years old and has much better support from Nvidia on an AGP graphics card... they don't even make AGP graphics cards now (if you buy one new, it's refurbished... trust me). I started to feel like ATI/AMD was picking on Linux users until I clicked on about 4 different articles that all stated that ATI/AMD is ending support for these cards on ALL operating systems.

Ok, the jist of my rant is that I, and many others, would like hardware to be supported by the company's that manufacture them and we would like them to be supported with software that's made for current operating systems, not something that was developed for the abacus. Come on ATI/AMD, if you want to compete in today's market, you have to give your customer's what they want, not try to force them to upgrade their hardware everything 3 years. If you haven't noticed, we're in the midst of a recession right now, telling people you can use what you've got with the out-dated software we released yesterday isn't the best of business plans. If you're going to release a driver and deem it the "last driver" to support a certain line of products, then make damn sure it's going to work for those products on whatever current OS is on the market or in development (I'll bet the Window's equivalent of this driver works in Windows 7).

Update: Ubuntu 9.04, code named Jaunty Jackalope, was released, in Alpha, as early as November 24, 2008. That is 5 months before ATI released their newest Linux driver/software bundle that is officially supported on Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu (support reference).