Comment by kentonv

In my most recent attempt to use AMD, my problems were:

1. I needed to install a bleeding-edge kernel version in order to get support for the very new AMD card I had purchased, which was a bit of a pain on Debian. (With NVidia, the latest drivers will support the latest hardware on older kernels just fine.)

2. AMD can't support HDMI 2.1 in their open source drivers. Not their fault -- it's a shitty decision by the HDMI forum to ban open source implementations. But I was trying to drive an 8k monitor and for other reasons I had to use HDMI, so this was a deal-breaker for me. (This is actually now solvable using a DP->HDMI dongle, but I didn't discover that solution at the time.)

But every time I've tried to use AMD the problems have been different. This is just the most recent example.

Obviously I'm using the open source drivers, since the entire point of everyone's argument for AMD on Linux is the open source part.

The root problem may just be that I'm deeply familiar with the nvidia linux experience after 25 years of using it whereas the AMD experience is unfamiliar whenever I try it, so I'm more likely to get stuck on basic issues.