I'm glad the AMD GPU option still exists, I don't have great experience with NVIDIA on Linux. The rest of the upgrades, like the new top cover and keyboard, are very welcome
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So it is both driver changes and architectural changes.
There is also AMDGPU-PRO, which is the proprietary version based on AMDGPU. Used to be you'd need it for ROCm, but that hasn't been true for a while not. There really isn't any reason to use the "pro" version anymore, unless you have a some special proprietary app that requires it.
Open source GPU drivers are based on Mesa stack. So they share a common code base and support for things like Vulkan.
So it is sorta similar to how DirectX works. With old-school OpenGL drivers each stack was proprietary to the GPU manufacturer so there was lots of quirks and extensions that applied to only one or another GPU. That is one of the reasons DirectX displaced OpenGL in gaming... Microsoft 'owned' DirectX/Direct3d stack.
Well the open source equivalent to that is Mesa. Mesa provides APi support in software and it is then ported to each GPU with "dri drivers".
For gaming things have improved tremendously with "Proton", which is essentially Wine with vastly improved Direct3D support.
This is accomplished with "DXVK", which is a Direct3D to Vulkan translator.
This way Linux essentially gets close to "native windows speed" for most games that support proton in one way or another.
Which means that most games run on Linux now. Probably over 75% that are available on Steam, although "running" doesn't mean it is perfect.
One of the biggest problems faced with Linux gaming nowadays is anti-cheat features for competitive online games. Most of the software anti-piracy and anti-cheating features games use can technically work on Linux, but it is really up to the game manufacturer to make it work and support it. Linux gamers can sometimes make it work, but also they get flagged and booted and even accounts locked for being suspected of cheating.