Moral of the story: do not buy NVIDIA, except if you need it for e.g. CUDA.

My previous machine had an NVIDIA GPU and despite all the great work, nouveau was almost unworkably buggy. The proprietary NVIDIA drivers did not work with Wayland at all. I bought an AMD card, Wayland worked with open source drivers and everything was butter-smooth.

I now use a NUC with an Intel GPU. Similarly to ADM GPUs, it works great with open source drivers.

Yeah, sorta-kinda. If only AMD would be able to compete timely in the higher end GPU segment. It took AMD 2+ years to release Radeon RX 5700 XT (Jul 2019)† to match (with a very good stretch) Nvidia GTX 1080 TI (Mar 2017).

I support AMD and Intel for their open-source efforts, but still hold hopes for GTC 2020 announces.

† AMD Radeon VII was super overpriced and unavailable in my area, and it still released nearly two years later.

I'm not sure about where you live, but where I am, the 5700 XT is priced similarly to an Nvidia 2060, which it is very competitive with.

I specifically address higher end GPU segment, e.g. current RTX2080/RTX2080S/RTX2080Ti. If you want/need top-tier performance in consumer GPU market, in recent years AMD had generally nothing to offer in two years window. I afraid that this trend may continue with the AMD's "Big Navi" and NVIDIA's new 30-series. I hope Radeon will finally catch-up this year.

AMD Radeon is an amazing choice in low/mid GPU market segment though.

I'm really curious about the kind of workload you're hitting that GPU with. Because from what I gather, you change your GPU every two cycles ?

Do you use it for a specific professional application, or do you simply want the best performance ?

Not intended to be snarky just purely curious.

Ha, good question for a casual self-reflection. To be honest, I certainly do want the reasonably best performance: I find pleasure in the possession of technologies, which allow me to avoid being distracted in my work and leisure activities. But I always justify the practical outcome and amount of money I'm able to invest (e.g. RTX 2080 Ti is a no go). As for types of workload, in fact, nothing too fancy:

- Gaming. I expect playing current AAA-titles on 4K@75-100fps. And, oh boy, I'm an avid Linux gamer (Valve Proton/DXVK)! This is probably the most GPU performance consuming activity in the long term;

- GPGPU/ML/Hashcat/Pyrit/mining. Some ML hobby/educational projects, occasional hash-cracking, mining and other fun activities. From time to time I stumble (on Github or elsewhere) at weird, but interesting experimental CUDA/OpenCL-accelerated solutions for a variety of tasks. Hey, even my terminal emulator is GPU-accelerated nowadays[1];

- Video transcoding. Encoding 4K+ video content in the background, while keeping up with my general activity. Occasionally lending my GPU to a (professional video guy) friend for CUDA-accelerated DaVinci Resolve for A/V post-production.

I certainly don't upgrade GPU every two years, more like 3-5 years for every decently improved generation. As for Nvidia, going from 16nm EV (Pascal) to (supposedly) 7nm EUV[2], might yield in up to +40-60% performance comparing to current gen Turing; so I'm pretty hyped to upgrade from the already aging GTX1080Ti with no ray-tracing. Or perhaps AMD will be finally able to pull out some ground-breaking GPU performance boost with their so-called "Big Navi", based on the new RDNA2 architecture. But I'm afraid that it will be a competitor for the current gen of Nvidia graphic cards, and not future ones. In any case, 2020 promises to be interesting for GPU/APU market. As usual, I will look at the specifications, benchmarks and price tags — and make my consumer choice.

[1] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

[2] https://www.sammobile.com/news/win-samsung-nvidia-7nm-proces...

Or you could run X11 instead of Wayland if you have an nVidia card. That configuration also works well.

To be fair firefox 75 is the latest soon and had a ton of Wayland improvements since the version you are referencing.

When you are using wayland best is to bet on a roling distro as of now.

Oh, that was a double typo, thanks.

btw I use archlinux /s