Framework Laptop 16

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

It's so weird to hear people who have problems with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux, because for me it's always been the opposite. I have had problems with AMD but never with NVIDIA.

When the AMD driver was named "radeon" nvidia was better, but since "amdgpu" came out things have flipped.

Is this because the driver itself has changed in its operation or just from the name change breaking lots of code that referenced the "radeon" name?

They were referencing a time, in the middle of the 2010's, when "amdgpu" was released. It is a completely rewritten, different driver, and is mostly open source [0]. Before that, the driver was named "radeon" and it was very shaky. I can speak to this personally. I had desktop Linux systems with both AMD/ATI and Nvidia GPUs, and while there were some issues with Nvidia, the AMD/ATI drivers gave me nightmares.

Once the rewritten "amdgpu" driver came out, things got much better. The first few cards created after that (IIRC the Polaris GPUs, RX 400's), the situation reversed. I still have had occasional issues with various Nvidia cards (normally driver updates breaking things), but for almost a decade now, I have not had issues with AMD GPUs under Linux.

[0] Except for pro features while using workstation cards. You need to use a proprietary driver for those, but even those share a lot of code with the open source driver.

You have this largely right, but I need to defend the Radeon driver a bit here. The driver that caused all the problems was the proprietary fglrx driver, not the open source Radeon driver. The issue with the Radeon driver wasn’t stability, it was that it was 2d acceleration only.