> I do love AMD because its drivers are open source as opposed to nVidia.
AMD's drivers are not really more open that Nvidia's. Similar to Nvidia's Open GPU Kernel Module's[0], AMD's opensource drivers are mostly a shim that wrap firmware blobs[1] in which the functionality you really care about is contained.
That's still a huge difference though. You get in kernel drivers that properly support wayland and don't require recompiling modules all the time. Plus all the hacks one has to go through to run wlroots based compositors with nvidia.
Normally, firmware does not make the driver itself less open source.
I get it and I'd also like for all components of my devices to be open source. Still, the parts I really care about and have any idea of how to fix stuff in, are open source.
For nvidia devices there is (or was? It's been a while) a whole other set of horrible user-space closed-source stuff.
> AMD's opensource drivers are mostly a shim that wrap firmware blobs
I went and checked the size of AMDs vs NVs firmware blobs and the 2 GSP firmware that are used for new NV cards in the linux-firmware package (https://archlinux.org/packages/core/any/linux-firmware as references for what I checked) result in it being the single largest folder in there (40MiB). Compare that to the largest amdgpu firmware file which is at 392KiB with the entire folder of 562 items being <20MiB.
Not to say that AMDs firmware is open source or so, it certainly isn't, but even comparing the amount that is possibly done is somewhat laughable.
AMD _has_ open drivers which include not only the kernel parts but also DRM, video acceleration, and mesa/llvm backends. NVIDIA doesn't release any of this.
Are you going to claim that because both have proprietary firmware, it doesn't matter if you are forced to run proprietary software to use it?
Using Mesa is already an order of improvement of openness, and frankly, calling it "a shim which wraps firmware" is a ridiculous thing to say.