The part about them being buggy is definitely true.

Up until somewhere around 2016-2017 the ATI/AMD drivers were really bad.

I had an "HD 7850" GPU on Linux around that time and it was barely usable. The performance was less than half of what you got on Windows, and the drivers would crash very often, sometimes several times a day if I was trying to play games like Team Fortress 2.

It was so bad that I decided to replace the HD 7850 with a new GTX 970 and decided to not buy anymore AMD GPUs for the indefinite future. The GTX 970 was stable and performed very well with the closed source drivers, and other than them being closed source I never had an issue with them. I always installed the closed drivers through the system package manager which handled all of the tricky stuff for me (Arch Linux maintains the nvidia driver as a system package and makes sure it runs on the current kernel before releasing it).

In modern times the situation has flipped though. I still haven't bought an AMD GPU since then but I am pretty sure my next one will be.

I agree; 2016-17 was about the turning point. I bought a Fury X around then, and it was flawless back then. In contrast, my old nvidia cards had become unusable.

On the AMD, FreeSync and HDMI audio didn't work at first. (For any card; the driver documentation said those features were a work in progress.)

Anyway, I unplugged it for a year or so, and recently plugged it back in. One apt get upgrade later FreeSync and HDMI audio just work.

It's gotten to the point where I'd opt for an ARM laptop over one without AMD or intel graphics. From what I can tell suspend resume doesn't work on intel CPUs (on windows or linux), so it's basically AMD GPU or no x86 at from a compatibility perspective. (Did AMD also eliminate S3 suspend, and not replace it with a working alternative?)

Just bought a 6600XT, and it's been great.

Literally just plugged it in and installed the driver packages I didn't on initial setup, on most distros it would've literally been plug and play.

I also had a HD 7850, and though I had pushed it less than you I never noticed any huge issues.

It was in a uniquely terrible position of being one of the last cards released supported by radeon when all the development had moved to amdgpu, which it supposedly could run if you jumped through the right hurdles. I remember the xorg feature table having several things working for older and newer models but not the 7850.

Still, my experience with it led to another AMD card that I've also been quite happy with.

About them being buggy, I won't discuss. But you didn't have to do anything to even get them installed.

For the people downvoting. The dude is saying there was nothing to download since the drivers come with the is install.

I belive this is talking about radeonhd/radeon/ati circa 2015 or earlier.

Around then, you still had to install the corresponding X11 portion of the drivers, though the nvidia eqiuvalent had the same limitation.

radeon/radeonhd, or fglrx (which was the propriertary AMD graphics) absolutely worked worse than nouveau or the proprietary nvidia drivers at that time. It was only a couple of years into amdgpu where the tables turned.

At this point it would be nice if they'd backport their Linux drivers to Windows, as I'm now on my third AMD GPU in 12-13 years (HD 5770, r9 290x, 6900XT) to have issues where the driver will randomly crash when playing hardware accelerated video on one monitor while playing a directx game on another monitor under Windows.

I'm pretty sure I needed to mess with xorg.conf and other settings to get things like screen resolution and Compiz working correctly. I don't know what part of the stack was responsible for those issues, but I thought it was related to the graphics driver.

I could be misremembering though, this was 15+ years ago now.