NVIDIA is finally starting to play nicely with the community to help sort the driver mess out. Nouveau paired with NVK might actually be the future of NVIDIA graphics under Linux!
I still won't buy one just because of this news - they have done lots, lots of shitty things in the past. GameWorks, PhysX, Geforce Partnership Program, etc. While AMD is not exactly a saint when it comes to open sourcing, they still commit far more than Nvidia to open standards.
For me it was Gamestream. I literally didn't even check AMD because Gamestream was so important to me. My next graphics card will be the first ever not from Nvidia.
They've been dicks for two decades, just playing a bit nicee doesn't really change anything. If they work properly with open source, and enable proper in kernel drivers for the next decade or so I might consider buying something nvidia.
AMD GPUs have open source linux drivers meaning no extra configuration is needed on install. Some linux distros make setting up Nvidia really easy, but I ran into problems years ago. I think Nvidia is theoretically releasing open source drivers soon though
Nvidia doesn’t work out of the box on a lot (Debian for example)
But it DOES work. Debian/Arch/etc push the responsibility to the user to finish setting things up (kernel command lines, drivers, etc). How exactly is that an Nvidia problem and not just distros sticking it to their users resulting in user anger towards Nvidia?
Nothing "works out of the box" on an operating system without the OS installation process using auto-detection to guide the users through the additional steps required to setup WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. Yet for some reason when it comes to hardware GPU acceleration, the Linux distro response is just "fuck, Nvidia? figure it out yourself, I can't be arsed to add the required config files and kernel command params".
Debian doesn't push the responsibility to the user to finish setting things up though, it is designed to be complete out of the box, especially since Debian 12.
For what it's worth on my computer with a GTX 1650 and Debian 12, I am unable to use Wayland at all as the drivers simply do not work (yes, this is the nvidia-driver package, not nouveau). On Plasma, everything seems to move at a snail's pace, and on GNOME the desktop is constantly flickering and showing old portions of the screen. X11 is perfectly fine though.
On my cheap laptop with integrated AMD graphics though? Debian 12 with Wayland works like a charm and has no issues.
I was on Ubuntu 22, and now I'm on Arch with a 3090. Daz3d+iray/dforce works, FFXIV works, Stable Diffusion works, X11 works, everything I throw at my card just works. Blaming Wayland not working on Nvidia is just ludicrous as Wayland is it's own pile of half baked dogshit.