Linux users are complaining that the AMD graphics driver for their OS of choice is getting too big and is now causing issues. Red Hat Linux desktop engineer Hans de Goede highlighted this issue at the weekend, reports Phoronix. De Goede’s blog post describes the problem and helpfully outlines some workarounds for people who may be afflicted with the same or similar boot issues.
There have been several reports of boot splash issues posted on the Red Hat Bugzilla bug tracking system, sparking the attention of the Red Hat engineer. In brief, these issues are due to the Plymouth graphical boot experience not loading correctly on older hardware. Thus users experience a boot splash timeout, seeing just three dots on screen, and can find that they are stuck at this early point in the boot process. Plymouth has long been a default application in Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, and other distros.
