Quoting: GuestI don’t use Mint but if there is a driver manager, switching to the FOSS driver in it and rebooting should be enough. That will most likely not get you the latest and greatest version of the driver though.

To install a recent version of FOSS drivers, you’ll need to install a recent kernel, a recent Mesa, a recent Xorg, I think also a recent LLVM… Unfortunately Linux Mint doesn’t seem to have any official documentation about that (no wiki!…)

The only thing I found on the web is this: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Linux_Mint#Updated_Open_Source_Driver_PPA.27s

Yeah Mint doesn't have it in driver manager. I hear Ubuntu does. Almost makes me want to switch if it wasn't for my hatred of Unity.

Yeah, you're going to have to use a PPA if you want the latest mesa and features. There are a lot of improvements with llvm-libs, kernel and mesa itself which you'll need to set up. I've heard people using both oibaf and edgers but since I'm not a mint/ubuntu user I can't comment about which is better. If you have a newer AMD card (300 series) you should probably also have the latest kernel since 4.5 has a series of AMD-specific changes.

I don't know about your level of Linux proficiency, but if you can't figure it out on Mint, maybe try one of the rolling release distros? Antergos is a noob-friendly Arch and is what Mint is to Ubuntu. Even comes with the cinnamon DE. I've also heard good things about openSUSE Tumbleweed.

And here I am using FOSS drivers because I do not have to mess with them at all. But then I am happy with the stable ones for my card that my distribution ships with.

Quoting: PublicNuisanceYeah Mint doesn't have it in driver manager. I hear Ubuntu does. Almost makes me want to switch if it wasn't for my hatred of Unity.

I'm running Mint Xfce 17.3 and the driver manager does list the open source driver for my GPU as well. And Ubuntu 14.04 PPA:s are compatible with Mint 17.*, so finding updated driver packages shouldn't be a problem.

But if you want to try Ubuntu without Unity, there's always Xubuntu, Kubuntu etc.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: PublicNuisanceYeah Mint doesn't have it in driver manager. I hear Ubuntu does. Almost makes me want to switch if it wasn't for my hatred of Unity.

I'm running Mint Xfce 17.3 and the driver manager does list the open source driver for my GPU as well. And Ubuntu 14.04 PPA:s are compatible with Mint 17.*, so finding updated driver packages shouldn't be a problem.

But if you want to try Ubuntu without Unity, there's always Xubuntu, Kubuntu etc.

Maybe I am mistaken. There is the open source X.org driver in the driver manager. Is that the same thing as Mesa ? I thought they were different. Maybe I was making this way more complicated than it had to be.

Quoting: PublicNuisanceMaybe I am mistaken. There is the open source X.org driver in the driver manager. Is that the same thing as Mesa ? I thought they were different. Maybe I was making this way more complicated than it had to be.

Yeah, all of the major FOSS GPU drivers are developed as part of the Mesa project. In fact Mesa 3D is the only major FOSS implementation of OpenGL and its variants for Linux.

I found out why I couldn't find any driver saying Mesa. I usually keep my update levels at a level 2 (safe). There is an update specifially saying Mesa that is at a level 4, rated unsafe. Basically more prone to stability issues so I was hiding them from myself. Not sure I want to do the update now. I'm not well versed in Linux yet to do serious troubleshooting but I do want better GPU performance. That being said I am on a fresh install and if I had to do another would lose nothing.

Upgrading low level components like Mesa can of course be risky, but anyone using Arch or other more bleeding-edge distros take the same risk every time they upgrade these system packages. This is just anecdotal but personally I always install absolutely every official update from every level on my machines, including the latest kernel available in the kernel manager. Maybe I've been lucky (or maybe I've got well supported components) but this hasn't caused stability issues on any of my machines in the years I've been running Mint. Of course this isn't necessary and often will not benefit me in any practical way, but in the end I'd say installing another distro is a much bigger risk than simply installing some upgrades from the official repositories.

BTW: This upgrade won't make your drivers "say Mesa". Like I explained earlier, all of the free software graphics drivers you see in the driver manager are Mesa drivers.