> Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).
Most likely you are playing games that Valve has already deployed patches/hacks for. Go off the beaten path from Steam and the proton runtime and you will find quickly that AMD is severely buggy.
Black screening is especially common with vega dgpus, can't say if it extends to the igpus are not but if you google 'vega black screen bug linux' you will find hundreds of reddit posts and bug reports about this going back to 2018.
I can’t speak to discrete cards, but it’s been pretty reliable for me.
I’m curious as to if your friends are using distros with older Mesa/kernels? That might explain some of the disparity.
All three are stable for general desktop use on Arch Linux (so up to date kernels etc). The NVIDIA set up has massive compute advantages (CUDA), but for desktop use if anything I have fewer issues on AMD - especially relating around desktop tearing and video which is where I have the most pain with NVIDIA.
Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).