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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Update: Thanks to tips from Bernhard J. Wolf, I have successfully installed the AMD Catalyst 13.11 beta driver in Fedora 20. I did not need to use Maxorete's install-file hack. When I opened the file that needed to be changed, it looked like AMD had already made the fix -- and since Catalyst did install, I can confirm that they did. Thanks, AMD! Keys to success were adding the kernel-devel package in Fedora. It probably couldn't hurt to make sure you also have kernel-headers, which I already had. Bernhard also said the installation wouldn't work with GNOME installed. GNOME, you are now history on this machine. With kernel-devel and without GNOME, the install of AMD Catalyst 13.11 beta went like butter. I will do a new post that contains all of this information, but for now I leave what I wrote earlier today in its original form below. You know, for history's sake:

Original post below (I didn't need the install-file hack)

Anybody who has read anything I've written in the past month know that the sudden absence of the AMD Catalyst driver in packaged-for-Fedora form is really chapping what's left of my Linux hide. The fact that so few seem to care is just stamping my "get out of Dodge/Fedora" ticket.

But given momentum's pull, principally the fact that I have Fedora set up the way I want it, I'd rather stay for now and move at some time in the future. When I'm ready, that is.

So I've gone against the advice I've held to since Fedora 14 crapped out on me, that advice being, Don't install Catalyst directly from AMD.

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