i can't afford it but if i had the spare cash i am like this fucking close to just buying an APU with some basic-ass radeon functionality in it just so Wayland isn't a flickering neovampyre glitterland of visual glitches, holy fuck
and why does my application menu not appear 80% of the time i click on it, how can shit be this bad for half of gpu owners out there, how can we even tell people that switching to linux is a good idea if xorg is dumped and people are walking in with geforces
(i am also assuming a radeon would fix this, and i'm wondering if im being lied to by radeon/wayland stans about how stable their shit really is)
When I migrated away from Windows 10 back to Linux (because lmaoooo Win11 and my boot SSD went kaput so I needed to fresh install regardless) I went with Fedora 35 because, well, Fedora was the distro I used the most back in the day (when it was called Fedora Core!)
KDE Plasma on Wayland caused catastrophic hard crashes of the entire system and the solution was to use X11 instead. I talked with a friend of mine, Neal Gompa, who is one of the members of FESCo, about all this and some other weird gremlins that were manifesting from me turning the GNOME spin into a KDE setup. He slipped me the final Fedora 36 KDE ISO before it went live and we did a clean install together, using my phone with Discord to do a video call. This was the first version to have Wayland as the default for the KDE spin, and thus use Wayland for the live desktop/installer. And it did the catastrophic hard crashes, which are so bad you can't even change to a virtual terminal to debug. It took us several dozen attempts to get the installer going without the whole system going kaput, but we did manage it. During this time, Neal told me that what I was experiencing was a bug that had been reported before, but was not able to be reproduced by anyone on the Fedora team. When I told him that I was using an RTX 2060, it turns out that nobody on the Fedora team had anything newer than the GTX 10-series to test with.
A few months later, he asked me to make sure my system was fully updated and give Wayland another try to see if they actually fixed it. That's when it started being more like how it is now: rather glitchy, but at least it doesn't tank the entire system at random.
The reason AMD (and Intel!) graphics work better is because AMD (and Intel!) actually work with the Linux kernel and have their graphics drivers become part of the kernel itself. From even a stock-ass kernel direct from the Torvalds, IT JUST WORKS. Even I'm flabbergasted at this! I've always remembered having weird driver issues with Linux and now it's just... working??? But not with nvidia. They only recently started making some of their shit public, and they really don't seem to care much about non-Windows platforms. Generally, a distro will instead ship with noveau, which is a clone driver for nvidia stuff, and it for the longest time didn't work properly with RTX 20-series and newer cards because nvidia intentionally designed their cards that way. When nvidia opened up some of their stuff, noveau was able to update to be Not Absolute Shit on these cards but still fairly kneecapped.
Meanwhile, AMD (and Intel!) are working on their drivers for Linux out in the open, on the LKML, actually listening to bug reports and feedback and improving support. They actually give a shit about where Linux is going, and actively test on Wayland as well as X11. They actually see Linux users as part of their user base, and thus will actually do their damndest to support them.
When I rebuilt my desktop PC several months ago, I was initially going to go with a Radeon card to replace my RTX 2060. But when I mentioned my build plans to Neal, he instead suggested that I give Intel's GPUs a shot as an experiment. I got an A770 OC card and It Just Works with KDE Plasma on Wayland. The experience is just, so much better, like it's barely different from the X11 session. It's crazy how much giving a shit about your user base makes a difference.
Intel's first crack at a proper modern GPU and it's... actually decent! Windows users have had some driver problems (but they're doing their damndest to fix them, which is great!) but on the Linux side it's been fairly smooth. And it's actually a pretty good budget option now?!
Budget nothin. My a770 LE runs damn near everything my good friend Raymond Tracing likes to play at a pretty decent clip, and stays cool under load to boot. It's not a 4090 super TI deluxe OC edition but for four hundred dollars you could do so much worse.