I think that says it all right there. AMD is willing (and has) done great things for open source, and Nvidia (by your own admission) has not. In fact, they are actively hostile towards open source developers. AFAIC, that puts Nvidia out of consideration for Linux. If you're comfortable with proprietary drivers for a huge chunk of your OS, why are you even using Linux? But I guess it's all about "muh games". Typical gamer-only attitude.

thanks for confirming that you were posting bullshit, because it invalidates also your current statement.

If you don't even acknowledge that they have a proprietary driver you can't say it's bad.

Next thing people like you will be telling us how and when to use our OS and software and your "muh games" bullshit meme is old.

Yep. And, for me, most stuff comes from a gamer-only attitude and AMD has been great for us (especially for people who use their officially supported distributions). In my almost 20 years of using Linux, it has never been easier since AMD opened up their driver. It's just great not having to worry about proprietary bits being compatible with various projects making us have to pin packages back and whatnot (my experiences with both Catalyst and Nvidia); nope, now it's just install and use your computer because it's that simple. Not to mention that it's brought us projects like gallium-nine and dxvk-ags, not one but three Vulkan implementations for the AMDGPU driver, the ability for people who know what they're looking at to actually do something about odd acting games and whatnot, first class gaming support due to being used in the PS4 and Xbox One; if you don't think that helps gaming on Linux you're fooling yourself since AMD has that shared driver concept, the easiest way to get a full compositing desktop working OOTB, forcing Intel's hand and giving Intel GPU users those same benefits....

People with the "typical gamer-only attitude" outta be thrilled about AMD and all they're doing for us directly and indirectly.

Michael, AMD released the 19.20 AMDGPU-Pro driver yesterday.

Damn.. I think I will just stick to correcting the output when a new application gets confused and picks the wrong one.

AMD OSS support:

I have to admit that _latest_ Mesa git stuff (after new AMD runtime linker) + a late patch from Nicolai and Marek let all 3 luxmark versions run under Mesa OpenCL (1.1), now. Only 'Hotel Lobby' is slow and show some corruption with v3.0 and v3.1 running on RX580.
Jan Vesely is working on relocation and image support.

I'm gonna call utter bull here. The gamer crowd which tends to favor Nvidia hardware has as much right to express an opinion and use and ask for support for Linux as zealots like yourself. You're also conveniently leaving out that HPC users vastly out number Linux gamers are almost exclusively Nvidia GPU shops. That's not just scientific compute centers, but also massive clusters for financial high speed transaction computing, engineering compute setups, all use Nvidia GPUs, the proprietary driver/CUDA stack, and Linux. AMD doesn't even have a credible horse in the GPGPU race at this point.

You can piously mouth about how much AMD is doing for open source and free software, but at the end of the day people have to get work done and AMD GPUs aren't workable for a great many people. In fact, most Linux systems are headless servers or embedded devices and in neither case is the argument about who's doing more in the GPU space even relevant, while many developers don't even bother with discrete GPUs and just use the system's built in Intel GPU, assuming an Intel laptop or desktop.

The fact of the matter is that AMD didn't even bother doing much testing with any OS other than Windows when Ryzen was released (see the brou-ha-ha over the multithreading crash bugs in the Ryzen initial release revealed via Linux and FreeBSD users and AMD's prolonged silence on it), and those CPUs are far more relevant to the computing industry than AMD GPUs.

AMD is not the monolith people seem to think, and neither is Intel. Like AMD, Nvidia is neither entirely bad, nor entirely good for open source. They ARE supporting Linux and releasing drivers for the operating system, testing for compatiblity, and suggesting interop concepts. That's more than the vast majority of the computer hardware industry is doing.

With respect, I can understand how someone might have thought that ~12 years ago when we announced the open source driver initiative, but it's hard to believe anyone would actually think that today. Not only did we hire a new team of open source driver developers, but all of the developers working on closed source fglrx** moved across to work on the open source drivers as well... and that team has also continued to grow. We did this to make better drivers, not to save money.

** except for the developers working on closed source OpenGL, who kept working on closed source OpenGL for AMDGPU-PRO and added closed/open Vulkan as well

Guessing you haven't been following recent reviews and benchmarks ? In general our open source Linux driver performance is on par with NVidia's closed source drivers for comparable boards, with the usual "some games favour NVidia, other games favour AMD" caveats.

True, however that was a Ryzen-only testing gap. Epyc and Threadripper were heavily tested on Linux, but for better or worse Ryzen was viewed as selling into a pretty-much Windows-only market and tested accordingly.

I believe that gap has been closed now (AFAIK the second gen Ryzen CPUs had a smooth launch from Linux POV), but we will continue to monitor.

bridgman AMD’s effort is appreciated. My next laptop will be with AMD CPU & GFX; probably Lenovo, as Dell seems stuck on Intel.