In fact, AMD actively recommend you use the open source ones. I think the community radv vulkan driver also outperforms anything proprietary they offer.
Nvidia still requires proprietary out-of-tree drivers and causes breakage every so often, but AMD is just like Intel integrated graphics now. Never tried it with an AMD APU, but I would hope it would be the same with the open source amdgpu driver.
It is a big regression that won't ever be fixed, OpenGL 3.3 instead of OpenGL 4.1 and barely working hardware video decoding.
Yep, it is a 10 years old hardware, yet Windows 10 drivers are perfectly capable of handling it properly.
E.g. I remember nVidia drivers always being crap. Even the blob ones.
Latest example for me is Swiftpoint Z mouse. Doesn't work on Linux.
From what I understand, either drivers are in the Kernel and thus open source. Or the drivers are outside of Kernel and thus break on every kernel update.
As for Kickstarter projects with proprietary drivers targeting only Windows and/or OS X, well, yeah...
You’re right that with proprietary closed-sourced drivers one has to be prepared to be a bit cautious or conservative when upgrading the kernel. Though unlike Windows there’s no real reason to always be on the most recent version (critical kernel security issues are rare).
Running a 4.x kernel is still considered bueno.
Ubuntu's kind of lost its way recently though (snaps/apt mess, went a tad bit early with pushing Wayland as default). The derivatives like Mint, Manjaro, PopOS and Zorin seem to be the way to go for the average user.
The one thing that might trip you up is (these days rare) hardware incompatibilities. Dell and Lenovo (the only personal experience I have) are great when it comes to laptops. For integrated GPU, Intel Just Works; nVidia and AMD can occasionally require a bit of hassle depending on chipset and kernel. Discrete GPUs I don't have any recent experience but the word on the street seems to be that if you're fine with proprietary drivers both nVidia and AMD/ATI works flawlessly while FOSS drivers can be hit or miss.