Debian does a good job of repackaging nvidia blob to itself's non-free repo to achieve painless install process.

Cool, this is good to know! Should be easy to get it hooked up in Mint.

Note: helper packages (i.e. installer cleanup and kernel mod builder) are in both contrib and main repos, so I highly recommend setting up APT-preferences.

Unless you buy Intel or AMD.

Up until very recently I was on Catalyst drivers on Mint 18 and it was just as bad. Thank God the open source drivers work decent now.

And Intel? HA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

One word: gma500 ... welcome to hell!

Yes, I'm talking about the state of software now and hardware up to about five years old. gma500 is from about 2008, apparently.

Except that Intel still doesn't make a graphics chip worth anything when it comes to running 3D games like Fortnight. And AMD opensource drivers are far from having nVidia-like feature and capabilitiy parity with their Windwos counterparts. Sadly.

What is missing from AMD's drivers? They are great now IME, I'm using them to play games. (Note I have older GCN hardware - there seem to be more bugs with more recent hardware where they are still making bigger changes)

> What is missing from AMD's drivers?

OpenGL performance. NVidia tends to be far more performant than AMD on OpenGL games.

AMD has put more work into Vulkan, but a lot of games on Linux are still on OpenGL. See the CEMU community for details: https://www.reddit.com/r/cemu/comments/7nehtz/cemu_1113_amd_...

For a while my employer was buying motherboards with a graphics chip that requires gma500 drivers. Forget which but it was an Atom platform of somewhat recent vintage. gma500 ain't dead yet, sadly