Suggestions for Llano laptop

I have a 2012 HP Laptop it’s got an amd 3520m apu with a Radeon 6620G Terrascale GPU.

With the new distros geared towards the gcn architecture my laptop doesn’t get very good driver support . I would like to be able to run full fledged and drivers, adjust clocks with things like corectl to adjust clocks and voltages on GPU and CPU.

I know this is all possible because I did it on windows with their drivers but I feel like this Apu is so old I may need to run an older distro or older drivers that support this llano architecture

I’m willing to follow whatever advice to make this laptop run right.

In windows I could change boost clocks to a 3ghz burst speed and a 2.7 all core overclock that’s from a stock all core clock of 1.6 and a 2.5 burst speed. All at lower voltages than stock. Well within thermal envelope.

I’m sure whatever can be done on windows can be done better in Linux, but myself I have yet to be able to achieve this.

Thanks ahead of time for

I feel clocking should be done in the bios, but linux supports it in other ways as well.
That has a bit to do with drivers, though it sounds like maybe not the way you think.

That isnt up to us, or any linux distro.
Your system will either be supported by the manufacturers (likely closed source) drivers, like nvidia, or a community open source driver like nouveau. IF you have a card no longer supported by the ‘regular drivers’, like if nvidia drops support, then thats true no matter what distro you use.
Manjaro supports whatever is supported.
Either auomagically using tools like mhwd, or of course, by the good old manually compiling things yourself if you want to go that far.
In your case the card is likely supported by radeon though not the newer AMDGPU.
Of course … you could always just boot a live image and check it out.

As to clocking the ATI/Radeon drivers? Theres some hints on this page:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ATI

I suppose I didn’t make myself clear…I have the newest driver that supports my cars, it’s Radeon 15 or something, but I can’t install it in latest Manjaro because it needs an older version of xorg, so I was hoping someone would suggest a version of Manjaro that comes with an older version of xorg that supports Radeon 15.

Reason I’m trying to do this is that the display has been slow and buggy and I need proprietary drivers to run davinchi resolve. I’m only making video to post to Instagram so I don’t need to do 4k 1080 or 720 will work but openshot has been rough to work with and I would like to use something a little better.

I dont think it is …
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/xf86-video-ati/

…Do you mean ‘catalyst’ ? You dont want that. nobody wants that.

That is not a thing. Manjaro is a rolling distro. It is either up to date or unsupported.

Back to ‘catalyst’ … it doesnt exist. You can complain to davinci or to AMD - but your only choice with this card is the open drivers that were reverse-engineered. There is no fglrx or catalyst in Arch/Manjaro repos or even AUR now. ATI abandoned you long ago, and the drivers were quite poor anyways.