AMD used to be terrible on Linux, perhaps before your time. Nvidia was always the choice if you needed functional hardware acceleration that worked on par with windows. The nvidia driver was/still is? the same driver accross platforms with a compatibility shim for each OS. This is how Nvidia managed to have best in class 3D acceleration accross Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux for decades now. OpenGL support historically on AMD was really bad, and AMD support was through a propriety driver back the day as well. Part of the reason the AMD/ATI opensource driver gained so much traction and support was that the propritery driver was so bad! Then you get onto other support for things like CUDA for professional work which Nvidia has always been light years ahead of any other card manufacturer.

Source: Was burned many times by ATI's promises to deliver functioning software over the years. Been using Nvidia on Linux and Freebsd for as long as can recall now.

Nvidia and intel on linux for near on 20 years now, and also agree - generally the ATI/AMD experience was markedly worse.

Currently dual 3090s in this box and nvidia is still as simple as just installing the distro package.

There was a period in the mid 2010s where trying to get better battery life on laptops by optionally using the discrete gpu vs the integrated was a real pain (bumblebee/optirun were not so solid), but generally speaking for desktop machines that need GPU support... Nvidia was the route.

Don't love their company politics so much, although I think they're finally getting on board now that so many companies want to run GPU accelerated workloads on linux hosts for LLMs.

But ATI sucked. They seem to have finally gotten there, but they were absolutely not the best choice for a long time.

Hell - I still have a machine in my basement running a GTX970 from 2015, and it also works fine on modern linux. It currently does the gpu accel for whisper speech to text for HA.