nvidia just works better on linux. Well… I heard that’s changed so this may no longer be relevant
This isn’t and has never been the case. Nvidia and AMD are comparable performance-wise on Linux these days, but since the Nvidia drivers are proprietary, they’re automatically harder to deal with than the open-source AMD drivers. For that reason alone, AMD is easier to use with Linux out of the box, because the Linux kernel has AMD drivers built in. You still have to install userspace drivers in either case, but the open-source AMD userspace drivers have outperformed Nvidia’s proprietary drivers for a long time. It’s only been within the last couple years that Nvidia’s proprietary drivers have reached parity with AMD’s open-source ones.
For a long time your options were a closed source driver from nVidia that worked, an open source reverse engineered driver for nVidia cards that didn’t work, a closed source AMD driver that wasn’t very good and lagged behind the PC version by a big distance, or an open source AMD driver that lacked many features and didn’t support the newest cards.
Maybe in the last 5 years things have started to change, but for a long time, if you were willing to use the closed-source nvidia drivers, they were just the good option that worked for most cards.
This isn’t and has never been the case. Nvidia and AMD are comparable performance-wise on Linux these days, but since the Nvidia drivers are proprietary, they’re automatically harder to deal with than the open-source AMD drivers. For that reason alone, AMD is easier to use with Linux out of the box, because the Linux kernel has AMD drivers built in. You still have to install userspace drivers in either case, but the open-source AMD userspace drivers have outperformed Nvidia’s proprietary drivers for a long time. It’s only been within the last couple years that Nvidia’s proprietary drivers have reached parity with AMD’s open-source ones.
Er, yeah, it used to be a huge problem.
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1788388
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1954162-which-distro-has-better-driver-support
https://www.pcworld.com/article/427004/why-nvidia-graphics-cards-are-the-worst-for-open-source-but-the-best-for-linux-gaming.html
For a long time your options were a closed source driver from nVidia that worked, an open source reverse engineered driver for nVidia cards that didn’t work, a closed source AMD driver that wasn’t very good and lagged behind the PC version by a big distance, or an open source AMD driver that lacked many features and didn’t support the newest cards.
Maybe in the last 5 years things have started to change, but for a long time, if you were willing to use the closed-source nvidia drivers, they were just the good option that worked for most cards.
It was the case prior to 2015 or so before the amd open source drivers actually became good.
They didn’t exist prior to 2014. Amd also required proprietary drivers and were a significantly worse experience than Nvidia back then.