Linux Gaming

I'm not regretting the switch, no worries :). Overall the Radeon 7800 XT is still a great card, it's a decent step up in terms of efficiency compared to the RTX 3080 as well and the PowerColor Hellhound model I got is the first card I ever had (well, with active cooling at least) where I actually agree with the reviews that the card stays pretty quiet even under load.

I also know how to work around each problem: KDE has a built-in workaround for the cursor stutters (as of version 6.something) and in GNOME you can disable hardware cursor which can decrease performance, but so far I haven't really noticed anything. The artifacting and eventual crashing after standby with enabled VRR can be worked around by reconfiguring any display: I usually change the refresh rate of my second display between 144 and 165 hertz. The frequency of random crashes decreased a lot with newer kernel versions, and I'm not even sure if the crashes I had in KDE 6/6.1 were caused by the AMD driver or by KDE - which seems quite a bit more moody to me than the more mature KDE 5. That's also why I'm trying GNOME now (which I actually enjoy using way more than I thought). A few days ago AV1 decoding on AMD was borked in Mesa 24.1.something, but was hotfixed a few days later. My self-compiled kernel 6.10 refused to boot with errors related to a network card, but I'll check it out again as soon as Fedora releases their official test build (potentially this weekend) and will report the bug should it still occur. As soon as 6.10 is working, that's one less workaround for me to worry about (unless that fix somehow doesn't work for me).

My comment was more about the fact that I'm happy NVIDIA starts taking Linux serious (again). It's probably not quite there yet, but NVIDIA seems to be committed to delivering a good Linux driver now and their latest releases each brought big improvements. There still seem to be some bigger issues (like the one you described), but now I'd assume we'll get there sooner rather than later.