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.