Like I said... I gave up and bought an AMD card. Not everyone is going to do this. It's a step down from my NVIDIA card.
I think there is still hope. Obviously today's reality is still bleak with signed blobs and plenty of question marks, but I think open-gpu-doc is a sign that NVIDIA does actually want to square away this problem, maybe they're just not sure how.
I do believe NVIDIA is mostly responsible for Wayland's poor adoption, and I firmly believe that this also lead to Wayland not getting as much developer attention as it could've gotten. The fact that one company wields this much power is a serious problem. I kind of understand the hostility Linux kernel developers seem to have towards proprietary drivers under Linux now.
Kernel developers are right to push back against blobs. Nvidia is the bad player here.
AMD is doing fine though. I have RX 5700 XT, and besides for some rough edges due to it being very new and drivers still fixing bugs, it's a very good card.
I expect Nvidia usage on Linux to plummet, due to their refusal to provide open drivers. It's already happening, just will take some time for it to drop to the point where they have little influence.
Personally I’m not the biggest fan of wayland (I haven’t found a compositor I like and using OpenGL for everything including VTEs feels like a mistake.) but I will say it’s common knowledge (as far as I’m aware) that nvidia drivers on Linux are pretty bad and you’re not going to have a good experience with them no matter what kind of display manager you use.
In what world are nVidia drivers crap? I'm regularly doing some pretty funky stuff with OpenGL on top of X11 and nVidia and this setup fails me less often and less hard than any equivalent AMD setup has done so far. Unless I'm trying to allocating tons textures or ridiculously sized vertex buffers, I don't see any hickups at all.
In the Linux world. All of their problems (roughly you can call them poor integration with the Linux stack) are consequences of them refusing to upstream their kernel driver.
The fact that Nvidia blob fails you less is not a good indicator for you, unless you test with Mesa as well in each case. Mesa is a lot stricter about OpenGL spec compliance. So if you only test on Nvidia, you likely have bugs that you didn't notice.
Every time I tested with Mesa and had issues, it turned out that Mesa was out of spec and quite specifically lying about that fact. And this was with absolutely essential features like rendering into floating point textures. So no, Mesa is not an indicator for spec compliance, either.
So when was it exactly? I doubt recently. Mesa progressed to the point of full compliance a few years ago. Today, it's trusted a lot more than the blob, due to the later silently swallowing errors frequently and messing around with substituting shaders behind the scenes.
Try testing current Mesa versions. Previous experiences are no longer relevant.
I think there is still hope. Obviously today's reality is still bleak with signed blobs and plenty of question marks, but I think open-gpu-doc is a sign that NVIDIA does actually want to square away this problem, maybe they're just not sure how.
I do believe NVIDIA is mostly responsible for Wayland's poor adoption, and I firmly believe that this also lead to Wayland not getting as much developer attention as it could've gotten. The fact that one company wields this much power is a serious problem. I kind of understand the hostility Linux kernel developers seem to have towards proprietary drivers under Linux now.