So I finally did my FedUp upgrade from Fedora 19 to 20, and one of the things hanging me up was the AMD Catalyst driver, the packages for which come from RPM Fusion.

I should have looked into this more BEFORE I did the upgrade, because there are no kmod-catalyst packages for F20.

This has happened before. Catalyst is always behind Nvidia when it comes to RPM Fusion packages.

But according to these two threads, the maintainer of kmod-catalyst is orphaning the package, and unless someone else picks it up, there will be no new Catalyst drivers packaged as RPMs for any existing Fedora releases, including F19 and F20.

The good news for me anyway is that Fedora 20 with the 3.12.5-302.fc20.x86_64 kernel marks the first time that the AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics chip in my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop has had working 3D acceleration without the proprietary Catalyst driver.

But it's not as good of video as I get with AMD Catalyst (aka fglrx if you're running a Debian-based distro).

Without Catalyst/fglrx, animations in GNOME 3 aren't as smooth, games that use 3D don't perform as well, and full-screen video in VLC stutters a bit. Again, that's better than GNOME 3 not running at all (which is what has been happening with the open Radeon driver in recent months), but I'd rather have the choice between the open Radeon and proprietary Catalyst drivers.

Oh, and my suspend/resume situation is the same. Suspend appears to work fine, but without resume (which doesn't work at all), why bother?

The laptop does run cooler with the proprietary driver, too.

Back to the point: I'm not willing to download and run AMD Catalyst directly from AMD. That's always been a prescription for endless fiddling and bricked video. I have heard good things about the open Radeon driver in the 3.13.x kernel, and I will wait for that to roll into my system before I decide whether or not to abandon Fedora for a distribution that isn't orphaning the Catalyst/fglrx driver. Among those: Debian, Ubuntu and everything derived from them.

I've always said I'd prefer to run the open driver, and there has been substantial progress in making my particular AMD video chip work better in Linux. But there needs to be just a little bit more performance. The stuttering video NEEDS TO GO.

And before this release, GNOME 3 did not work at all. It works now but is struggling. For me, that means more time running Xfce.

I'd love to see a dramatic improvement when the 3.13.x kernels come into Fedora. If that happens, all is forgiven. But if not, more than likely I'll be moving from Fedora.

Update: Full-screen video in Mplayer is much better than in VLC and GNOME's stock player. That's a workaround but not a full-blown solution.

At this moment, it looks like the AMD Catalyst driver will be disappearing from RPM Fusion. A bad day for #Fedora Linux users.

— Steven Rosenberg (@passthejoe) December 24, 2013

(Click the image above for a larger version)

After news that fedup 0.7 stood a good chance of not successfully upgrading you from Fedora 19 to 20, the project's developers swiftly pushed out fedup 0.8 to solve this and a great many other problems.

As you can see above, the change has come through to my system, and I have updated the package. No, I haven't actually run the fedup upgrade to F20, though I did use the program to bring this system from F18 to F19.

You don't want your bike chain to fall off.

It very well might if you use fedup 0.7.x to do your Fedora 19-to-20 upgrade:

Adam Williamson, who calls himself the "Fedora QA Community Monkey," writes:

I just poked it a bit and it sure seems like upgrades with fedup 0.7 to F20 are busted. They definitely worked when we tested shortly before release, though. I can only think that using fedup 0.7 against upgrade kernel/image built with fedup-dracut 0.8 doesn't work.

If you have fedup installed, you can tell your version with this:

$ yum list fedup

Here is my output of that command:

fedup.noarch 0.7.3-4.fc19 installed

According to Fedora devs and other expert types, the thing to do is wait for fedup 0.8, which will be moving onto Fedora 19 systems any day now via the usual update mechanisms.

Adam puts it this way:

So, here's the news: do your upgrades to F20 with fedup 0.8, yo. It's in updates-testing for F18 and F19 at present, but will go to stable for F19 tomorrow. If you're upgrading from F18, you'll need to pass '--nogpgcheck' to fedup, because of <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1040689>.

Failed fedup upgrades aren't fatal but also aren't fun, so it's worth the wait for a new fedup.

Later: Chris Murphy on the Fedora users mailing list suggests this command to update to fedup 0.8 right now:

$ sudo yum update fedup --enablerepo=updates-testing

Then you could run the full fedup:

$ sudo fedup --network 20