I've literally never had an issue in decades of using NVIDIA and linux. They're closed source, but the drivers work very consistently for me. NVIDIA's just the only option if you want something actually good and to run ML workloads as well.
The problem with comments like this is that you never know if you will be me or you on your graphics card or laptop.
I have tried nvidia a few times and kept getting burnt. AMD just works. I don't get the fastest ML machine, but I am just a tinkerer there and OpenCL works fine for my little toy apps and my 7900XTX blazes through every wine game.
If you need it professionally than you need it, warts an all. For any casual user that 10% extra gaming performance needs to weighed against reliability.
A mechanic might say "This car has never given me a problem" because the mechanic doesn't consider cleaning an idle bypass circuit or adjusting valve clearances to be a "problem". To 99% percent of the population though, those are expensive and annoying problems because they have no idea what those words even mean, much less the ability to troubleshoot, diagnose, and repair.
This might provide you a suggestion that alternate manufacturers should be considered.
I have confirmed this to be the case on Google and Bing, so DuckDuckGo and Startpage will also exhibit this phenomena.
If you think they're wrong, be sure to let them know.
So you see now why that's not very relevant to end-users experiences they were talking about?
That's the only way they would be disagreeing with me.
On plenty of distros "I want to install it and forget about is reasonable" and on both Gentoo and Ubuntu I have rebooted from a working system into a system where the display stopped working, at least on Gentoo I was ready because I broke it somehow.
I think it also got so much better over time, I've been using Linux since debian woody (22 years ago) the stuff you had to deal with back then heavily skews my perspective on what users today see as unacceptable brokenness in the Nvidia driver.
That's the opposite of my experience. I'd love to support open-source. But the AMD experience is just too flaky, too card-dependent. NVidia is rock-solid (maybe not for Wayland, but I never wanted Wayland in the first place).
My nvidia problems are generally software and update related. The NVidia stuff usually works on popular distros, but as soon anything custom or a surprise update happens then there is a chance things break.
Black screens, X server crashes, OpenGL programs either crashing or running slow. Just general unreliability. Different driver versions seemed more reliable than others, which meant I was always very reluctant to upgrade, which then gives you more problems as you end up pinning old versions which then makes it harder to troubleshoot online...
> My nvidia problems are generally software and update related. The NVidia stuff usually works on popular distros, but as soon anything custom or a surprise update happens then there is a chance things break.
I mean if you run mixed versions then yeah that will work for some upgrades and not others. A decent package manager should prevent that; some distros refuse to put effort into packaging the nvidia-drivers out of principle. But if you keep the drivers in sync (which is what the official package from NVidia themselves does, it's not their fault some distros choose to explode it into multiple packages) and properly rebuild just the kernel module every time you do a kernel upgrade (or just reinstall the whole driver if you prefer), then it's rock solid.
The cards worked fine with binary drivers once the system was installed, but AFAIR, I had to integrate the binary driver packages in the Ubuntu ISO in order to boot.
I presume that now, the situation is much better, but necessiting binary drivers can be a problem in itself.
The only "trick" is I'm still on X11 and probably will stay. Note that I did try wayland on few occasions but I steered away (mostly due to other issues with it at the time).