If you look at Nvidia's past and how they try to use proprietary technology to take over the market, e.g. PhysX and G-Sync, it kindof clashes with the opensource ideology of linux. Also the open source drivers for team red are much closer in performance to their proprietary counter-parts. If you do a little searching around on linux forums you will find more issues and complaints for nvidia drivers. Nvidia is also a proponent of direct X, something that would be working against open source technology.
no open source drivers for red are like any other open source driver they lack the secret sauce that uses the cards 3d accelerate to full performance. the post above you nailed it. Yeah Nvidia are dicks. i don't care so much about open source (i do care) but, more about alternatives to OSX and windows and custamizability and being able ot run my games and play movies all that stuff that i own a computer for in the first place. Open source is all well and good and all assuming you have usable product in the end. ultimately open source isa very valuable tool that can accomplish that but, it will take time.
Yes, drivers for NVIDIA cards do exist. Are they as easy to install as AMD drivers? No. Many distros just come with the AMD drivers on the CD, I think Mint does for some of the less bleeding edge cards. But I can personally say NVIDIA cards are a PAAAAAAAIN to deal with, you have to completely get out of X to install some (maybe all) of them, and if you have installed the open source drivers you are pretty much crap out of luck because its near impossible to convince the NVIDIA installer that you've removed all the open source driver packages.
Speaking from experience, AMD works a lot better on Linux. Even the junky older cards like the Radeon 4350 work fine. I had to fight with a GT210 for literally 2 hours on Debian to get it to even go over 1024x768
what the hell i just told Ubuntu to install the prop drivers and a minute later it was done and i was playing games. I have the hd2600xt and the hd2000 has ZERO current prop drivers, un less you use a 10 year old distro version.
DEBIAN.. idk never used it but, you temp me to try it. how long was this? because if it was over 2 years ago a lot has changed hence me giving another go at an ATI/AMD setup.
An update to myself...I tried the propitiatory Omega drivers on Linux Mint and they seem to work much better. They are not integrated on the drivers application yet so I had to deactivate xorg forst but the installation was smooth and the drivers seem to work much better than before.
Which distros have/are you going to use? I'm really interested in this, always curious to see how little I have to use linux. I like Zorin 9, based on ubuntu 14.04lts, right now.
Don't try it unless you can get an r series card, the older ones just don't do so well on linux anyone will admit that.