Comment by turpentine

From people who have been using Linux since the 90s, the long term view is that nvidia has always been mostly fine since the early 2000s for hw acceleration if you didn't mind a binary blob. Yes, there have always been driver bugs - but that was never unique to a specific platform, i.e. nvidia on macos had opengl driver bugs that went unfixed for eternity until support was dropped, then the bug reports could be closed.

Comparatively the leading alternative was a dumpster fire of a broken mess for the longest time on Linux. All through the 2000s, ATi provided a binary blob driver known as fglrx which some people joked was a half-baked codebase from somemthing that started on HP-UX, passable enough for running sales demos and then was thrown at an intern to port it to Linux. If you went with ATi and tried to do much with foss opengl programs, you could expect daily or weekly kernel panics and performance that was <50% of that of the windows driver for an identical build. The solution was always to buy nvidia if you wanted stability.

Nothing has really changed for Nvidia on Linux, it still continues to perform adequetly. Plenty of people, including myself have used the binary blob for games and other 3D software with wine through the late 2000s, 2010s and proton in the 2020s without much comment because it works fine. The exception being that if you buy a used card, coming up on 10+ years old because your requirements are minimal - don't expect current driver support. Nvidia drop support for old cards on Windows too.

AMD is definitely night and day in terms of meeting the free software ecosystem properly, and so arguably the reason to go with a new AMD card is voting for that kind of support with your wallet.