For a long time your options were a closed source driver from nVidia that worked, an open source reverse engineered driver for nVidia cards that didn’t work, a closed source AMD driver that wasn’t very good and lagged behind the PC version by a big distance, or an open source AMD driver that lacked many features and didn’t support the newest cards.
Maybe in the last 5 years things have started to change, but for a long time, if you were willing to use the closed-source nvidia drivers, they were just the good option that worked for most cards.
Er, yeah, it used to be a huge problem.
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1788388
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1954162-which-distro-has-better-driver-support
https://www.pcworld.com/article/427004/why-nvidia-graphics-cards-are-the-worst-for-open-source-but-the-best-for-linux-gaming.html
For a long time your options were a closed source driver from nVidia that worked, an open source reverse engineered driver for nVidia cards that didn’t work, a closed source AMD driver that wasn’t very good and lagged behind the PC version by a big distance, or an open source AMD driver that lacked many features and didn’t support the newest cards.
Maybe in the last 5 years things have started to change, but for a long time, if you were willing to use the closed-source nvidia drivers, they were just the good option that worked for most cards.