yep. nvidia was the only choice back then. I don't see how folks have forgoten that. But, now it's all AMD for me, because amd doesn't require a closed source driver or userspace. Apparently that will change in the next year or so though. It'll be interesting to see how the open nvidia stuff compares in the future.

Nvidia will always require a closed source userspace, the only part they've opened is the kernel side. And the new kernel driver only works for 2000 series or newer.

But it's still a pretty huge step in the right direction, even though it won't be as nice as AMD's fully open source and upstreamed driver.

Some people have no idea how nice it is now compared to 15 or 20 years ago.

I took an NVME out of an Intel machine, threw it into an AMD machine, booted it, and everything just worked, graphics included. No weird network drivers to track down, sound card drivers, proprietary graphics or even xf86- stuff needed.

This was me. I had a Radeon 290x. It worked alright, but fglrx was terrible (and the config UI was the only non-English app in my system, it didn't respect locale settings), and when AMDGPU first arrived, it was a horribly buggy flickering mess. I upgraded to a 1080Ti after high-end Vega failed to materialise, and nvidia's drivers kind of just worked, especially on Ubuntu (they were proprietary of course, but so was fglrx).

It wasn't really before Wayland started being a serious option that nvidia started to become a problem. I've now upgraded to a Radeon 7000 series GPU, and the open source drivers are a breeze and Wayland works much better than it does under nvidia's drivers. But I maintain that at least during the GTX 900 series through probably the 2000 series, nvidia was the only reasonable choice, even on Linux, especially if you wanted anything mid-range or above.

> Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years.

That was very welcome at the time, but the bar has been raised. I now have the option of a GPU that plays games and integrates well with all my other OS features, so I switched. It has been great to be free from all the annoyances that came with the Nvidia drivers.

Never used fglrx. Open source Radeon driver worked well (including OpenGL suppor in Mesa) on old ATI Radeon R200/R300 cards 20 years ago.

Notice that they are talking in the present tense, while you are talking in the past tense.