[Arisaka1]

One of the reasons I went with AMD for my new GPU was Linux support. Nvidia has been abhorrent of Linux before Torvalds did the famous gesture and that was over 10 years ago! My old workstation had an Nvidia and performance has been all over the place, and that's on lucky days!

[pclmulqdq]

I have found that more recent cards from both vendors are a lot better on Linux than their older gear. My 10 year old GPU had huge issues on Linux (running fine on Windows), but when I got a more recent GPU for my Linux box, it ran fine.

[thomastjeffery]

That's one of the main issues that is solved with open drivers.

A year or two after AMD acquired ATI in 2006, I had just gotten my hands on my first ever modern graphics cards: the All-in-Wonder 2006 edition. It was basically a Radeon 9600 with a built-in capture card.

This was also around the time I was really getting into Linux. I'm pretty sure I could dig up a CD with Ubuntu 8.04 that I burned fresh in 2008.

As a poor teenager living on abandoned hardware, I watched the full life cycle of that card's Linux support. I lived it.

At first, the proprietary driver support was pretty good. I could just open Ubuntu's handy dandy "driver manager", and get a neatly wrapped .deb installed. A quick restart of Xorg, and I had full GPU support. I could turn on all the flashy compiz effects: wobbly windows and a cube of virtual desktops.

This was the most exciting era for the Linux desktop. It was easy, familiar, and powerful. All we needed was a compatible MS office alternative and a few well-ported AAA games, and we would be living the dream. The future of Linux was bright and close.

A few years passed, and proprietary Radeon drivers weren't getting packaged anymore. The free fglrx driver was stable, but didn't have DRM (direct GPU rendering). Even in windows, there wasn't great driver support for ATI cards. This was pain from every direction, and for whose benefit?

A few more years passed, and fglrx became the best driver: better than the proprietary one. By the time this happened, though, you could get a vastly more powerful card for ~$30, so the point was moot.

When AMDGPU was announced, I was ecstatic. Finally, a major hardware company found the value in making a full-featured, performant, and open driver. Never again will I need to fight the most purposeless incompatibility, the pain with no benefit, the hell that need not exist in the first place: proprietary video drivers.

[tracker1]

Had a 5700 XT at launch... drivers were effectively broken in mainline Ubuntu for nearly 6 months. I had to use a beta Kernel, which broke other things. I sold that and managed to get a 3080 via newegg shuffle, went back to Linux after various Windows issues following.