5.4 was released in November 2019, while Navi with the 5x00 series was released in July 2019, so that's actually 2 release cycles or so of the kernel before hitting stable support. For comparison, Intel already has Gen12 graphics support in place across the entire software stack despite the fact Tiger Lake/Xe are not available until later this year (Mesa support for Gen12 was merged in Oct 2019!) AMD is just comparatively not as good about this, frankly, and I say that as someone who has the luxury to (and often does) run -rc kernels for latest hardware. This is not only true of their graphics cards, but to some extent their CPUs as well.
They need to get their software support up earlier. I get that there are issues like supply chains, OEM firmware, and all that jazz, but they aren't amateurs flying by the seat of their pants here, they're capable of doing this. If I had to guess I'd say it's simply because AMD's software department seems stretched pretty thin, where as the competitors have enormous software teams. Hopefully they can fix that.
>5.4 was released in November 2019, while Navi with the 5x00 series was released in July 2019
Their specific card was released in January 2020, and the only problems they list are some strange dmesg entries. They may be lagging a bit compared to Intel, I am not following closely enough to note, but is Intel even offering competitive GPUs?
I agree completely! Unfortunately that means either running a very recent distro release, a rolling distro, or upgrading the kernel on a stable distro like Slackware or Debian, currently at 4.4.x and 4.19.x respectively. I chose to run a recent distro release (Pop!_OS 20.04), with the caveat that overall stability is not up to par with traditionally stable distros like those mentioned above. My C2Q workstation runs Slackware 14.2 and, as mentioned before, is rock solid. It has an AMD FirePro "Turks" era card, and it's doing quite well with the open source driver.
Ubuntu LTS releases have an official "Hardware Enablement" kernel which is reasonably up to date. On 18.04 LTS, its currently using Kernel 5.3. New Desktop installs default to this updated stack.
That's good to know, thanks. I had a lot of bugs with Ubuntu 20.04 that weren't present in Pop, so I stuck with the latter.
My goal is to reach stability with Slackware (probably when 15.0 is out) or Void (currently buggy on that build). I prefer KDE Plasma to Gnome, but System76's customizations really make it useful for now.
I think needing a kernel released after the video card is a fairly reasonable demand.