NVidia has always been more of a pain under Linux for at least the past 5 years, even if AMD wasn't contributing much to the open source drivers code-wise at the time they published hardware specifications for their cards so the mesa and DRM developers could do a halfway decent job. My Radeon R9 290 worked quite well without installing fglrx, as did my Radeon HD 7850.
I'm actually at the point where I need an upgrade for my work laptop, and I am going to seriously push for something that doesn't use NVidia graphics since they're such a pain to deal with under Linux (especially Optimus, holy crap).
I just recently build a full AMD system (Ryzen 5, Radeon RX 560) and I couldn't be happier. I've had Intel systems that were fine but couldn't keep up with GPU performance. I've also had nvidia systems that were fine performance wise but the closed nvidia driver has been more and more problematic lately (crashes, VSync is off, etc.).
Not only that but it's all free software. When freesync support lands I can't image ever using anything but AMD under Linux.