That's incorrect in many ways.

Proper integration with the Linux desktop is important for gaming. This includes monitoring and benchmarking tools mentioned above. Nvidia blob has abysmal integration and will always be like that, until of course they'll decide to work with Linux upstream as they should have years ago already.

Wayland progress is important for gaming as well, and Nvidia is slowing it down.

Far from excellent, due them being closed exactly. And of course far from enough. They only support what they care about, nothing else. And since it's a blob, no one can do anything about it. Not only that, they also prevent reverse engineering efforts from replacing their blob, since they know that as soon as that happens, no one will be using the blob anymore and they'll completely lose any control.

I.e. imagine Nvidia trying to pull off "we don't support standard adaptive sync, buy expensive monitors with our G-Sync modules" and (functional) Nouveau saying "we support standard adaptive sync". Or Nvidia saying "your card is old, and won't get any updates, use legacy driver, for new features buy new hardware", and Nouveau saying "we'll support new features on your older card". Nvidia surely hates that idea, that's why they work hard to prevent Nouveau from becoming a viable replacement.

To summarize, support is far from excellent and their attitude towards Linux is simply nasty. Linux users should not be endorsing them.

Still at some price points only Nvidia really makes sense, even with worse support and lower speeds. I really hope AMD will fill out their 5000 series with more models posthaste. That does not help with only Nvidia having hardware accerelated ray tracing for now though.

Before anybody starts calling me a fan; let me tell you that every second of my graphics cards has been Nvidia, every second AMD, just coincidence.

One more thing: I admit to never having used Linux on a pc with Nvidia graphics, only Intel and AMD. I promise to remedy that this winter.

No. Good performance is important.
This is also untrue, to say the least. "nvidia-smi" provides VRAM usage logging and there is a checkbox in the "nvidia-settings" to enable FPS overlay.
The fact that you can not use your beloved "open source" utilites does not automatically mean you can not do that.
It is not.
And if you insist on this, then I should mention proper hardware encoding (NVENC) for game streaming. And what does AMD provide for this?
That is just your subjective perception. Hard facts state otherwise: nVidia drivers provide better performance (the same as on Windows™) on day one, while AMD drivers…
Lots of preaching and fear-mongering. All of this has nothing to do with gaming. Ideological mantras in their finest.
Amen!

The X games from Egosoft:
Does anyone know how to unlock new game starts on Linux with the GOG version. For Windows there is a simple register change needed. Anything like that on Linux? I tried looking and searching but failed coming up with a useful aswer.

About nVidia and linux I will avoid any lengthy comment and just describe my current experience.

I have MSI GP62 6QF Leopard Pro notebook, with nVidia GTX960M card, for two years.

I still didn't manage to make the nVidia work (so I use only the integrated Intel GPU the whole time).

I tried about two times, and usually I have newer kernel which is not yet supported by nVidia drivers, or when eventually I have kernel which may work with driver, I get black screen (probably because of the hybrid Intel/nVidia stuff, which is on MSI notebooks even a bit more customized than on others, but if I understand it correctly, it's ("optimus" or how they call it?) borked pretty much everywhere. ... too much fuss to hunt this down precisely (luckily the Intel GPU is enough for me).

You know you can turn the integrated completely off in the UEFI settings, right? But, if it is fine as it I guess it is better leave as is.

Thx for answers so far.

I meant how long the card lasts if it is used heavily. Although support duration is somewhat important too - if the card is dead no amount of support continuation will fix that.

Unfortunately I dont understand the terminology used here. But IME its important to be able to monitor GPU temperature and GPU fan speed and (if needed) to somehow limit these with some external (outside of the game) tool.

That's all they care about. It's far from the only necessary thing.

Where is their lm-sensors support?

Check this please before discussing Wayland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g

Proper hardware encoding is VA-API, not NVENC. Both AMD and Intel support the former.

ffmpeg and OBS support VA-API, so use it for streaming all you like. Where is VA-API suport in Nvidia blob?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API

It's pretty objective, that Nvidia are slowing down the progress of Linux desktop, including gaming. If you happen to care only about what Nvidia cares about, you might assume they have "excellent" support. But don't assume your use case covers all things Linux support really needs.

Coming from a Windows user, this comment wouldn't surprise me. But coming from Linux one, it does. Nvidia wants users to think that Linux is just Windows, rebranded. It's not, and Linux users shouldn't endorse that stuff.
Dismissing facts as "ideology" or "preaching" isn't going to change them. Nvidia have a completely disgusting stance on Linux due to their anti-competitive attitude.

Check also these for more in depth comments by Nouveau developers:

* https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/open-source-nvidia-linux-nouveau/998310-nouveau-persevered-in-2017-for-open-source-nvidia-but-2018-could-be-much-better?p=998316#post998316

* https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/open-source-nvidia-linux-nouveau/998310-nouveau-persevered-in-2017-for-open-source-nvidia-but-2018-could-be-much-better?p=998427#post998427

And I'll repeat what I said. It's quite bizarre some Linux users are endorsing Nvidia's behavior, when it's clearly anti-Linux in so many ways.

Nvidia supports older cards in frozen mode. I.e. they don't get any recent features updates. They require you to use the stale "legacy driver". That's their way to force people to buy newer hardware more frequently. And it's surely way shorter than 10 years. I mentioned this point above already.

Monitoring involves sensors, and on-screen HUDs. Open drivers are integrated with Linux sensors subsystem. Nvidia blob is not, so requires totally different way to access them.

To sum things up for Nvidia - very bad integration, and clear anti-competitive stance on open drivers for their own hardware.

IIRC that's not possible with the optimus/prime MSI-hybrid solution, as the nVidia doesn't have standalone output to the LCD panel (physically in HW), but needs the Intel GPU to provide the framebuffer + output signal.. (may be I recall some detail wrongly, because the last time I did really try to get into the issue deeply was 2 years ago, when the notebook was new, and as it was not working properly, I gave up and I just once in 9-12 months if the newest distro kernel + nvidia drivers work, but they don't and I don't dig into it any more ... but it was quite convoluted and ugly HW solution in the first place)

Unless you really physically burn it by accident (or you get some low quality piece from manufacturing), it should IME easily outlast the SW support in new kernel+drivers (nVidia obviously as they retract support for old cards regularly, AMD open source drivers may get broken for cards which are no more used widely), on the kernel side the sweet spot is probably around 3-6 years. When you are too early, you will have no drivers, then after some initial period the drivers will be finalized and tuned, then the 3-6y period begins when everything works beautifully, then it will slowly start to decay (if you keep updating to latest distros ... you can of course stay frozen in time on the last one which did work well).

At least that's my experience, my HW is usually SW obsolete before it breaks (except notebook batteries, those tend to give up first).

Do you mean previous X games or X4? I thought they have postponed new gamestarts till 3.0 for X4.
There is thermal control section in the "nvidia-settings"
And who decides what is proper and what is not? Or are you implying that a company in order to enter the "Linux market" should subject itself to the governance of some "Linux Boss" and pretty much dump its own technologies regardless of the quality because "The Boss" commands to do so? Sorry, Linux is no Windows. We definitely do not need dictatorship a-la Microsoft®.
They also support NVENC. What's the problem, again?
I repeat, who exactly commands to implement VA-API?
Yeah, sure. And "Ten Years in Development" and "Old Games Won't Run" Wayland is accelerating it to the speed of light. :)
I care about what general ex-Windows freshman cares. Games and driver performance. And ease of use.
Perhaps, I should explain myself a little bit clearer.
I am on Linus Torvalds'es side on this matter. And no, I do not mean the "NVidia, f*ck You!" quote. He once said that blobs in the kernel, however shady and untrustworthy they are, are essential to Linux ecosystem. Without them we would end up like BSD, or worse: no hardware support, no interest from manufacturers. The fact that Linux allows HW manufacturers to provide support in a non-demanding manner (no WHQL certification bullsh*t!) is a benefit, not weakness.
You, on the other hand, declare "openness", advocating THE FREEDOM, but in practice are behaving in the same way as Microsoft®: commanding on which technologies to use.
And in the meantime, what exactly are you suggesting to freshmen? To compile custom kernels and Mesa from Git? To wait six months till their freshly bought "Radeon 5700XT" gets proper "open" drivers, while watching their Windows™-using friends happily play? it is the same story with AMD, over and over again (see RX590)!
What else do you command freshmen to sacrifice for the sake of "freedom"?!
I am not against AMD, but if it thinks its ways of providing paid support for the bought hardware are better, it should provide drivers for Linux on Day-1 next time! Let the market decide.
Yeah, Linux users should willfully subject themselves to harsh conditions of unusable hardware for the sake of LIBERTY! :(
If "Linux is just Windows, rebranded" means I can easily get a new GPU, install and play right away, I am all for it!
Yes, we need Linux to be just as Windows™: robust, friendly and ready to rock from the bat!
Do you actually demand nVidia to magically glue-in Vulkan® support to my old trusty "GeForce 8600GT"? Old hardware is old. It will not get any benefits from new drivers, while the "legacy" ones are already providing all support they possibly could.
Look, my "GeForce 8600GT" belongs to 8 series, which was released on "November 8, 2006" (thanks, Wikipedia!). The latest available driver is 340.107, released on 2018.6.6 (twelve years after!), and it provides support for X.Org xserver ABI 24 (xorg-server 1.20). My current "xorg-server" is 1.20.5, which means the drivers still should work. Needless to say that card is now collecting dust in a PC I didn't use for like, six years.

So, stop spreading disinformation, please.

Uhmm, I keep reading everywhere on the Egosoft forums and may have mixed up X3 and X4 as now I became unsure which game that was about but someone said it was not posible to unlock starts on GOG with Linux. Since I only have the X3 games those are the ones I am interested in unlocking the starts in without having to play for several hundreds of hours to unlock them all (3 X3 games) every and each time I reinstall.

EDIT: https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=419332 In short: Unlocking new game starts in X4 with Linux and the GOG version is not possible due to missing Galaxy for Linux. It should be possible to unlock them with a hack somehow.

----
I also think new graphics cards should work from day one with both OpenGL and Vulkan, if the latter is supported. Performance does not have to be excellent but if you cannot use the GPU at all you are bound to get angry.

Not integrated with lm-sensors, so again the same lack of integration problems.

Those who collaborate. I.e. VA-API allows collaboration of all hardware to provide a single API for developers. Nvidia on purpose doesn't want to support it. It's like DirectX vs collaborative Vulkan. You should be getting this point without me explaining it.

Waste of resources on supporting lock-in tax, instead of using a common API.

Again, surprising some Linux uses are defending lock-in. It's simply irrational.

Did we? We have hardware with open drivers. It won't be a big deal to end up without Nvidia and its blob. It will speed up, not slow down Linux progress. If anything, BSD is very permissive about blobs, and has worse support than Linux.

Claiming that blobs provide freedom and open drivers are like MS is completely twisted. Given blobs are used as an anti-competitive tool by Nvidia.

So again, if you think WIndows approach is so appropriate for Linux, you are wrong. Good thing Linux kernel maintainers are very strict about it. Nvidia actually tried to push their blob integration into the kernel, and they showed it to the door.

To get cards with open drivers. If let's say AMD releases support in some kernel version a.b and you want to avoid all the manual stuff of the cutting edge hardware, use it from version a.b+1. That's when it gets pretty stable. In case of 5700 series you brought, it means support was added in 5.3, stability will be somewhere in 5.4. Quite similar thing was with Vega which is rock solid today. Would be better to get it faster though, but the current rate is on average one kernel release.

That's a legacy driver still. Check which series (the oldest) is supported by the up to date one.

So Microsoft says they are going to release the Chromium based Edge browser on Linux too. Any bets one of the required dependecies will be Mono?

Probably not too different than the other Chromium-based browsers, then again this is Microsoft, expect the unexpected.