Each time I try AMD graphics, something is fucked for me. Back with fglrx, fglrx just sucked, so I used Nvidia. Then I had an AMD right around when they finally had opensource drivers, but it was still buggy as hell. So I went with Nvidia again (first a GTX 790, then a GTX 1060). In the meantime I had a new work notebook where I also went with an AMD APU, and had driver crashes for a long time when I was in video calls and it had to decode multiple streams. That thankfully stabilized with Linux 6.4.
Since sooo many people in the community swear by AMD, I thought “dammit, let’s try it again for my new desktop” and got an 7800rx … and I have to reboot ~5 times until I finally make it to a running xserver or wayland session. Apparently I am hit by this problem (at least I hope so). But that doesn’t even read nice … the fix seems to be to revert another fix for powermanagement. So I either have a mostly non-booting card or suboptimal power management.
I start to regret having chosen AMD … again :-/ I seem to be cursed.
oh man, reading the comments fill me with fear, as I just ordered a new computer after stretching my old laptop for 8 years or so. I was super close to getting an AMD but went with Nvidia in the end… but so much bad juju in the comments for Nvidia too…
You may wish to pick a distro that makes a point of nvidia compatibility.
I use nobara, who have a few options in the welcome script specifically to improve compatibility with nvidia. I’ve specifically heard popOS mentioned several times as one people have liked with nvidia as well.
Some only ship with or distribute alternative open source nvidia drivers that tank performance.
Yeah, until this thread I was convinced I should stay away from nvidia GPUs when building a new PC with Linux in mind, but I’m not so sure anymore.