nVidia GTX 1080ti

In addition to the performance degradation, nVidia and the kernel maintainers don't currently get along so I'd also have to deal with that.

Ah, yes. nvidia is a thorn. In other news, the AMD and Intel drivers are as good as, if not better, than their windows counterparts!

Legitimately asking; does AMD still do that thing where they unceremoniously drop support for an older card on newer kernels - so you do a apt-get upgrade at some point and reboot to a black screen, and your options are either never upgrade your kernel or get a new GPU?

This, unfortunately is not as true as I wish it was. I bought an RX 560 and tried to install Ubuntu 18.04. It could not propery drive my 4k display that uses DP 1.2 MST. That display has been working fine with a few different cards on Mac and Windows since 2014 when I bought it.

I even tried the AMD pro drivers. Granted, the open source nvidia drivers couldn’t do it with a 1030 on 18.04 either, but the proprietary ones had no issue.

edit: I should note, the RX 560 runs fanless up to 60c on Windows, but the fans always spin on Linux.

It seems that support existed in KDE/Plasma workspaces in late 2014.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg2NTY

Though if you follow the DP MST keyword there's still some corner cases being polished...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=DP%20MST

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DRM-Misc...

The Mesa drivers Ubuntu (and Debian, and many other distros) provide CAN be rather old. As you mentioned Ubuntu, follow the directions here to have a stack that's as updated as possible.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Requirements

I also tend to like checking Arhc Linux support page, but it doesn't seem to be helpful for this issue: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Radeon

I have no problems running my RX 580 with the amdgpu driver and recent versions of Mesa.. If I had to guess, Ubuntu 18.04 has some archaic versions of both the kernel and userspace drivers.

Do you have a 4K display that requires DP 1.2 MST?

I tried the latest proprietary amdgpu-pro drivers also.

I even bought the RX 560 because some other Linux users assured me the AMD Linux drivers were excellent. My post here is to help other people so they can make a more informed choice in the future.

Shame their hardware isn't as good. Especially Intel's.