> Now with the legacy driver I have to force enable acceleration and even then I sometimes get the feeling it isn't really working, given how the fan behaves when watching movies on the go.
If you want zero-copy video playback for optimizing battery life use mpv with --hwdec=vaapi. Or vdpau or whatever API is supported with that driver. You can also try switching -vo to vdpau/vaapi from OpenGL.
> I know, and this kind of attitude regarding drivers is what as graphics oriented person, eventually pushed me back into the Windows/OS X world.
On Windows you get legacy drivers for older architectures as well. Also the case with NVIDIA. It’s legacy hardware, after all… AMD’s new driver is completely open source, but it targets GCN, which is a completely different type of hardware.