fglrx was pretty nightmareish itself 15+ years ago

nvidia driver on the contrary has always been reliable

Twitter and Reddit were pretty reliable, too. Needlessly putting yourself at the mercy of a company, especially perhaps for your main computer, seems like a recipe for waking up to headache where rage posting on social media is your only recourse.

99% of people's only recourse is rage posting on social media even if the drivers are open source. Not everyone is technical enough to work on graphics drivers or want to sponsor someone else to work on it.

The point is to keep the development incentives aligned with your incentives, and for it to occur within the wider ecosystem, such that cross-purposes problems don't happen in the first place.

> In my opinion, formed from over two decades of Linux, a piece of hardware having a libre driver written for it is the exact indicator of what can be relied upon to "just work".

Then this opinion can be discarded as not grounded in reality. In order to run pytorch at high speed I need to do... basically nothing. It just works.

Many things can be said about ROCm support for 7900XT, none of them are positive. "It just works" drivers from AMD come several months too late.