I don’t want any proprietary drivers

So then you don’t want any NVIDIA.

The AMD open source Linux driver performs better than their Windows driver. And there is no proprietary AMD Linux driver, the official AMD driver for Linux is open source.

100% AMD, for sure. AMD won’t make much problems and works ootb.

Nvidia on the other hand… if you already have a Nvidia GPU, then the proprietary drivers work pretty well, but even those won’t work flawlessly and still cause problems for many people.
And the FOSS drivers are still in the early stages and won’t cut it. So why spend lots of money for a piece of hardware that won’t give you the performance you paid for?

Also, Nvidia clearly doesn’t care about PCs or its’ users, so why support such a shitty company with your money?

FOSS driver only, the choices are AMD and Intel. Nvidia is out of the picture.

Of coursenouveau drivers are still around and under active development, but as far as I know the performance if still very far from reasonable expectations.

If you don’t want proprietary drivers the choice is quite straightforward: AMD. The official drivers are open source.

As for my experience, I’ve had absolutely no problems in the last few years with AMD, but I have to admit that I have always been using an iGPU, which has always been good enough for my needs.

I used to have problems with Nvidia proprietary drivers, but that was at least a couple years ago, things might have changed. I’ve never had issues with the free unofficial drivers, besides worse performance.

I bought an A-series Intel card (A310, bought for $110), and I’m very happy with it. Very good drivers that work perfectly with Wayland, and its recent OpenCL drivers now work with Blender and DaVinci Resolve too (despite Resolve saying that it only works with nvidia or amd, the new drivers make the dedicated intel cards work too). Gaming is not too bad either, but I don’t game much.

As someone who started using Linux while on Nvidia and stuck with it for over a year before going full AMD.

Just go AMD, so many little things I had to find workarounds for just because of Nvidias shitty drivers.

Even after Nvidia claimed to support wayland I could never get it to run on my install, then having to manually configure my xorg just to get my 170hz monitor working which then introduced graphical issues I just couldn’t fix…NONE of that was an issue the moment I swapped to a RX 7800 XT, didn’t even have to install any drivers they’re just standard in the kernal.

Only the kernel bindings are open source. The actual driver is still closed source. So that only leaves you with AMD and Intel.

Anything but Nvidia

If those are your criteria, I would go with AMD right now, because only the proprietary driver will get decent performance out of most nVidia cards. Nouveau is reverse-engineered and can’t tap into a lot of features of newer cards especially, and while I seem to recall there is a new open-source driver in the works, there’s no way it’s mature enough to be an option for anyone but testers.

I don’t want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)

In that case AMD, no doubt about it.

If you were considering proprietary drivers it would still be AMD but there would be some discussion about it.

The nouveau drivers are just barely enough to have a desktop, anything actually needing a GPU will perform very poorly (in my anecdotal experience with 4K). Or, to put it another way, choosing an NVIDIA card is choosing their proprietary drivers.

So you’re left with AMD (and Intel). The open amdgpu driver is pretty good and is suitable for gaming. Which I do.

I have no experience with Intel, but I believe their open drivers are pretty good.

So I recommend AMD.

If you’re unwilling to use proprietary drivers AMD or Intel is your friend. If you use proprietary drivers NVIDIA is mostly fine now.

AMD cards work great with the open source driver. As i understand it, the nouveau driver is getting better but might not be there yet? So if the non-proprietary driver is a must you might be better off with AMD.

Everyone’s gonna suggest AMD here because of your requirement of no-proprietary drivers; but unless you’re some sort of high-value target to a foreign government, I honestly choose the more pragmatic route of just using the proprietary NVidia driver and going NVidia. Especially if I’m not budget constrained on card.

The fact of the matter is, AMD has just simply fallen behind. NVidia cards are (and have been for like 3 generations now) more performant. There is good reason why they dominate the market right now; they’re just simply better.

It really depends on how far you want to take your zealotry on open source; there are parts of the CPU microcode that can see everything you do. Those are proprietary. Your bios is proprietary. You’re probably running 100 different proprietary blobs even IF you choose not to use the drivers that NVidia supplies; so why hobble yourself with a slower card that doesn’t have CUDA instructions? (often also very good for AI work if you are interested in that at all)

I certainly understand wanting to push that direction for the sake of pushing that direction but - is performance and stability less important than using a proprietary driver?

Just to add some variation to these comments.

Nvidia works absolutely fine on (arch) linux, that needs to be said. Performance is on par with windows.

Depending on what your needs are its the better choice. (I have a few pieces of software that greatly rely on CUDA)

But the elephant in the room is your need for non proprietary driver. The only open source nvidia does is the strict minimum to catch up and stay competitive on linux (they where losing before). There is a clear winner on this front. Que all the other comments.