What was true a few years ago has little bearing on what's true now. People buying new cards should be buying AMD. If your current circumstances don't make this possible for you, though, then there's nothing wrong with staying on X.

> Yes, I also dislike nvidia but a few years ago AMD was absolutely awful under Linux.

I can assure you that these days are gone. I just got a new Thinkpad with a Ryzen APU and nearly [1] everything worked out of the box. The R9 Nano in my desktop also works perfectly with the AMDGPU driver.

[1] "Nearly" because I needed to add "iommu=soft" to the kernel parameters to get Linux to boot.

I use nouveau on my 960, and the performance is pretty much the same. 10% seems like a big overstatement.

It very much depends upon the generation, the 1000 series cards aren't well supported but they do work.