I guess that OS like trisquel are actually made for this kind of
hardware,because i tried it on my new laptop(2013 manufacturing year,one of
the first Richland based AMDs APU with R7 M260 graphics)and my graphics card
performance on both GPU and APU was 5% which is disaster.
Trisquel's Linux-libre kernel can easily be updated:
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/update-linux-libre-kernel
The performance of the free software drivers on a same version of Linux or
Linux-libre should be the same, regardless of the distribution.