Regarding slowing down progress, I was talking about modern desktop like Wayland compositors and so on. Nvidia was hindering it for years. And their attitude towards Nouveau is disgusting.
As for slowing down Linux desktop progress, I think it's not Nvidia's fault: you could always get a card from another vendor, although the alternatives were not as good. Well, maybe those other vendors are to blame, and not Nvidia...
Today it's less relevant, since usage of Nvidia on Linux is gradually dropping, so their damage to the progress is also diminishing thanks to that. Wayland compositors' developers can simply say - we don't support the blob and don't plan to and be done with it. In the past it was much harder, due to how many Linux users had Nvidia still while alternatives were way less viable.
I think it's the opposite. Some years ago, Nvidia was your only chance to have accelerated graphics on Linux. ATI/AMD didn't care about it at all, and Intel cards were not for gaming. So Nvidia made it possible to do things in Linux when nobody else allowed you to... how's that hindering the progress of anything? Specially when nobody forces you to get an Nvidia card.
> And what about AMD bug tracker? It's open, so you can see the bugs. That's a plus, not a minus. Nvidia blob has all the bugs hidden somewhere, so you don't see them. It doesn't mean the blob doesn't have them.
Yes, I didn't say Nvidia was bug free. I just said AMD drivers for Linux are, at the moment, far from perfect, despite being opensource. I'd say, for newer cards, they're worse than Nvidia's. I value opensource, but if I have to choose between having an opensource desktop crashing twice a day, vs. the Nvidia blob, of course I'd go for the latter, as much as I'd love to have a fully opensource OS.