Especially while I'm obsessed with the state of AMD video drivers, but for all Linux and much BSD news, Michael Larabel's Phoronix is an essential site that I'm looking at every day.

I honestly don't know how he keeps up the pace, but if you're looking for news on the state of AMD, Nvidia and Intel video, AMD, Intel and ARM CPUs, the Linux kernel, benchmarking of hardware and Linux and BSD distribution, plus what's going on (both in plain sight and behind the scenes) in many of the projects that make up the free-software ecosystems, Michael appears to have it covered, and for that I thank him.

Thanks to the help of a few, proud Fedora users, I was able to install the AMD Catalyst 13.11 beta (version 9.95 to be exact) driver on my Xfce-running Fedora 20 system.

And thus the long local (as opposed to national) nightmare of poor video performance and a CPU running 30 to 40 degrees hotter is over.

I would love to stick around and wait for the open-source Radeon drive to get better, and I'll continue to keep an eye on it. But my test of the 3.13.rc7 Linux kernel -- which is supposed to include some key Radeon patches -- showed that it is no better on my machine than 3.12.x. That means it's not time to wait on the open driver but instead time to get serious about putting Catalyst -- direct from AMD -- on the laptop.

Today I was successful, and the CPU on my HP Pavilion g6-2210us is running at a cool 80 degrees as opposed to the not-as-cool 120 degrees under Radeon. And I can watch full-screen video in VLC (and any player other than MPlayer) without a) that video stuttering and b) both CPU cores jumping to 100 percent.

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