Yes, nvidia (the proprietary GPU driver) was way better than fglrx (the proprietary amd driver) and even nouveau (the open source reverse engineered driver for Nvidia) worked better than radeon for me in those days. It was intel for smooth sailing or nvidia for acceptable performance.
I think their unpopularity these days come from three factors:
1. For the gamer crowd, RTX 2000 was a price hike and even the higher end cards were not that impressive for performance. It looks like they were resting on their lead against AMD.
2. People love to root for the underdog and AMD was behind for the longest time.
3. For the developer crowd, the closed source Nvidia drivers were not great for Linux compatibility, and the Mac crowd couldn't care because they couldn't have Nvidia after their fight with Apple.
I think for a sample of the general public who have opinions on Nvidia, it's 1,2 and 3 in that order while for HN users, it's 3, 2 and 1 in that order.
I think their unpopularity these days come from three factors:
1. For the gamer crowd, RTX 2000 was a price hike and even the higher end cards were not that impressive for performance. It looks like they were resting on their lead against AMD.
2. People love to root for the underdog and AMD was behind for the longest time.
3. For the developer crowd, the closed source Nvidia drivers were not great for Linux compatibility, and the Mac crowd couldn't care because they couldn't have Nvidia after their fight with Apple.
I think for a sample of the general public who have opinions on Nvidia, it's 1,2 and 3 in that order while for HN users, it's 3, 2 and 1 in that order.