Obviously you're used to nvidia/windows way on doing things. Y=
ou are on
linux now. Opensource is the whole philosophy. So yes, please just use the
free/opensource drivers that come bundled with your favorite distro. This
is the preferred way to go with AMD hardware.

Here's the Radeon 7 with opensource amd drivers:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=3Darticle&=
amp;item=3Dradeon-vii-linux&num=3D1

Benchmarks between different mesa versions, so using an ubuntu ppa such as
oibaf or pandoka does matter to get the newest stack and best performance:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=3Darticle&am=
p;item=3Dmesa182-4-july&num=3D1

And.. the icing on a cake, the comparison between opensource radeonsi and
closed source (amdgpu-pro/radeon software aka the one you've downloaded):
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=3Darti=
cle&item=3Dradeon-software-1820&num=3D1

As you can see, apart from the fact that the closed source one is kind of
behind in performance, it also has some issues running some of the
benchmarks (aka it crashes), hence your experience.

So, in conclusion, yes. For polaris, on linux, use opensource drivers. If
you've messed up the distro with alot of experiments and closed source
driver installations, perhaps it would be better a fresh install and just
use mesa/llvm packages from pandoka ppa stable with a recent ubuntu
mainline kernel.

Goodluck,
Cheers!

---
Sent from mobile, apologies for typos.