Comment 82 for bug 1058040

And the Open Source x.org radeon driver still overheats, especially on laptops. This has been a problem for at least 4 years that I'm aware of, and not getting perceptibly any better.

My 5+ year old Tosh laptop (RS780 graphics aka Radeon 3100 found in the AMD 780V chipset) was fine with the fglrx driver and I was able to force the 2.8x version until I upgraded from 12.04 to 14.04. You can no longer downgrade back to an old copy of 12.04 and force the old version even though it's in the repositories unless you still have your first .iso download with the very oldest 3.2 kernel.

Any version of 12.04 I can see to download now with the oldest 3.2 kernel I can find won't install the 2.8x driver, apparently because there's no kernel support for the older drivers (fails sanity check). Somehow the problem has been compounded within the OS community after AMD forked their support for so-called legacy GPUs and the Radeon 5xxx GPUs and newer.

I started using Linux 12 or so years ago because it would run on older hardware after MS or Apple discontinued OS support for a given configuration. It looks like Canonical is getting more and more like Apple and Microsoft. Now if your hardware is over 5 years old, you're treated like some sort of Luddite.