AMD drivers are not more stable. They are however open-source and included in the kernel, which has both advantages and disadvantages:
- AMD has better support for the "blessed" Linux 3D stack. This manifests itself as more mature support in Wayland compositors for example, which is still rockier with nvidia.
- With AMD you need to care about running recent kernels, because improvements to the drivers are tied to the kernel, as is support for newly released cards. With nvidia it doesn't matter - I can run a stable distro like Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and still use the latest driver.
- Nvidia support for switching between discrete and integrated graphics in laptops used to be crap. I'm not sure if it's still the case as I don't follow this closely, but given historical record, it's likely still crap.
- Nvidia driver quality is historically better than AMD (across the board, not just in Linux). If gaming is your primary use, things are still more likely to "just work" on nvidia than AMD, although AMD will usually fix problems eventually.
- AMD has better support for the "blessed" Linux 3D stack. This manifests itself as more mature support in Wayland compositors for example, which is still rockier with nvidia.
- With AMD you need to care about running recent kernels, because improvements to the drivers are tied to the kernel, as is support for newly released cards. With nvidia it doesn't matter - I can run a stable distro like Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and still use the latest driver.
- Nvidia support for switching between discrete and integrated graphics in laptops used to be crap. I'm not sure if it's still the case as I don't follow this closely, but given historical record, it's likely still crap.
- Nvidia driver quality is historically better than AMD (across the board, not just in Linux). If gaming is your primary use, things are still more likely to "just work" on nvidia than AMD, although AMD will usually fix problems eventually.