Yet another person confused by the ATI/Radeon drivers changes.
To explain, I set up my son's slightly oldish laptop with a fresh install of Ubuntu after I discovered that he hadn't run system updates for years and he was still on Utopic Unicorn. Everything was running ok but I was concerned that it hadn't had security updates since the repos went down. I installed 16.04 because it's the new long time version.
When booting after install, I got a black screen with no backlight. Quick googling revealed I could try dropping down to a basic VESA display in the grub2 kernel command, which did work and I was able to complete the install and configure the system.
However, now I have a laptop with an awful VESA display and freshly-updated packages. My intention was not to trade away his ability to play games, for security fixes.
I know nothing about either Ubuntu (I normally use Gentoo on my personal systems) nor AMD (I always buy nVIDIA cards for my own use).
lspci shows 2 VGA controllers:
I'm not sure why two are listed, I tend to be a little fuzzy with understanding hardware. Is this AMD's version of the Optiumus integrated/discrete pair? On my cheap nVIDIA laptop the integrated graphics card is from Intel.
I do understand that he likely won't have a fantastic experience until some indeterminate period in the future when the open source driver improves. I have read enough to understand I've blithely and obliviously done this update in the middle of a very messy transition period. But is there anything I can do to get an AMD driver working at all (ie: not unlit black screen)? Even if it's just integrated graphics it would be a constructive improvement.
I have installed the xserver-xorg-video-ati driver.
xrandr listproviders shows 0 providers. I'm not sure where to go from here.