While Gnome developers bent under Nvidia's pressure, other compositor developers aren't interested in accommodating exceptions for blobs and wasting their resources on that.

TL;DR: just ditch Nvidia and forget about all their horrors. They really have no place in Linux ecosystem today, because of their refusal to upstream their drivers and because of preventing Nouveau from doing it for them.

1) top performance available on the market;

2) off-the-shelf passive cooled 4K capable cards (GT 1030);

3) (significantly) better performance per watt and less noise for high-end cards.

I still prefer AMD for their play-nice attitude with Linux and seemingly better track record on behaviour towards consumers, but Nvidia for the last years have been offering better hardware.

[1] https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3330-gt-1030-ddr4-vs-g...

> top performance available on the market;

Not anymore with new Navi cards. And competition in the Linux market will probably get even stronger with Intel releasing new GPUs with open drivers next year. I.e. there will be no reason to buy Nvidia anymore with all the blob downsides that aren't going to disappear.

> off-the-shelf passive cooled 4K capable cards (GT 1030);

For gaming 4K is really a read herring today, and for regular non gaming desktop use case, you don't need strong GPUs even for 4K.

> (significantly) better performance per watt and less noise for high-end cards.

Also not anymore with Navi.

So I'd say things today look pretty bad for Nvidia on Linux, and they'll be gradually losing Linux desktop market, until they will start playing nice with upstream. Time will tell if they actually will. I don't think they care though. And neither Linux users would care to use them.

My parent commenter did not refer to Sway, that's why I rejected the claim that AMD is the "only way for you to get a usable desktop with modern features".

> even Gnome can't handle XWayland with Nvidia today. And if you play games, especially in Wine, that's still a requirement

I'm not sure what you're referring to. I've successfully launched and played Wine games with Nvidia proprietary drivers in Gnome with Wayland.

How exactly, when it's not supported: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/NVIDIA

    There is currently no accelerated GLX support when
    running a GNOME Wayland session no top of the NVIDIA
    drivers, meaning X11 OpenGL applications will use
    software rendering.