Newbro looking for some help

Welcome to Trisquel!

To answer two of your questions:

No, chances are you won't have 3D acceleration with fully libre drivers unless you're using something like a GeForce 8400.

Also, the best way (in my opinion) for window snapping as you described it is to install the XFCE desktop environment. In the settings menu you can find a box labeled "switch desktops when dragging to the edge of the screen" or something like that. Simply uncheck that box and viola: dragging the window to the edge of the screen snaps it to half-screen view.

Also if you feel like learning an entirely new window manager, you could try a tiling manager like "Awesome".

> No, chances are you won't have 3D acceleration with fully libre drivers unless you're using something like a GeForce 8400.

Actually, most NVIDIA cards are supported by Nouveau. The worst offenders are the Maxwell series one (750/750 Ti for instance).

GNOME Shell supports tiling half of the screen (with the mouse or through a keyboard shortcut).

To clarify, since no one has said this explicitly in this thread, all AMD GPUs are basically junk. They can't do any sort of 3-D acceleration without proprietary firmware blobs, and there isn't much of an effort, if any, to reverse-engineer them (unlike Nvidia cards).

The hierarchy of GPUs from best to worst is: Intel integrated GPUs (e.g. Intel GMA and Intel HD; full libre drivers provided by Intel), Nvidia cards (no cooperation from Nvidia, but a mostly successful reverse-engineering effort), and finally AMD/ATI (Radeon) GPUs (no cooperation from AMD, no major reverse-engineering effort).

If you have an AMD card that's replacing an integrated GPU, take it out and offer it for recycling; it's a piece of junk, and it might be blocking an Intel GPU, which is the best possible choice. If you have an AMD integrated GPU, and it's a desktop computer, buy an Nvidia card that works sufficiently with Nouveau (Think Penguin sells one of the better ones), and use that. If you have an AMD integrated GPU on a laptop, you're probably stuck without 3-D acceleration, unfortunately.

A quick search suggests to me that what you have is a card, in which case you might be in luck; pull it out and see what happens. Either switching to your integrated graphics will have no discernible effect (if you have an AMD CPU), or it will solve your problem (if you have an Intel CPU).