No, it is NVIDIA who is joke, Nouveau doesn't support these cards just because of NVIDIA policy and management. And they are the only who deserve the blame in this case, not Nouveau or Google.

AMD has their own set of quirks, they are not open sourcing their main driver either. Nouveau was always a stopgap measure, to boot the system and make it somewhat usable until you install the official binary driver; so is amdgpu. Even if you are open source enthusiast who wants nothing but FOSS on your system (and this is a very minor use case), these drivers do no better than your integrated Intel graphics, which is integrated into CPU directly since time immemorial.

Nouveau and amdgpu were always barely working, just enough to get something on the screen — no state of the art 3D acceleration, no CUDA/OpenCL. But there is a big difference between “barely working” and “black screen on boot, always”.

"Nouveau and amdgpu were always barely working" — nah, you are spreading misleading information and lumping together completely unrelated projects at different stages of development.

Noveau has been almost close to usable at some point... Until Nvidia started the whole signed firmware nonsence. Then it quickly became intolerable due to Nvidia, supplying no signed firmware or heavily crippled firmware. These days you are actually better off using software renderer/llvmpipe (which at least might benefit from a powerful processor). "amdgpu" is a name of the modern AMD kernel driver, that replaced "radeon" driver. Both drivers were developed with direct help from ATI/AMD. Unlike it's older predecessor, current amdgpu versions include the "display core" code, that was designed to be shared between Linux and Windows AMD drivers (not sure, if that part has worked out yet). All Linux drivers for currently produced AMD cards are open-source, both kernel and userspace parts. AMD also has a "value-adding" package, that is based on their own userspace driver (which is open-source) and simply adds few closed-source components to it.

"amdgpu" is not barely working — AFAIK, it is the only currently available AMD kernel driver, and it worked great for me, both 2D and 3D.

I gave AMD a try with a couple different card, couldn't get them working properly. One was on a dual GPU setup, AMD failed, nvidia worked. Then I needed hardware accelerated HEVC encoding, bought a rv560, works great on windows, but AMD isn't playing fair with AMF on linux, once again failed by AMD, and I didn't want to install the proprietary nvidia drivers to use VDPAU, so that's a stalemate. Then I tried the AMD card on a split virtual monitor setup, once again AMD failed me, couldn't use both dvi & display port at the same time. Now I run a 1060 with nouveau and some quirk, best experience so far. Oh, and on windows, my rv560 can't properly get the resolution of the monitor behind an hdmi demux, the previous nvidia card worked like a charm.

AMD 0 - Nvidia 3

How do you run 1060 with nouveau? My 1080 doesn't even boot to anything except black screen.

It just worked out of the box with the last Fedora.

amdgpu is not a stopgap driver. It's mature and reliable enough driver to play videogames including a lot of windows games via proton. I don't see a single reason to use a proprietary OS or driver anymore.

As long as you don't have a funky setup, sure, but I've never been able to get AMD cards properly working for what I wanted to do (dual GPU setup, AMF on Linux, and multi-virtual monitors, ie 2 simultanious display on 1 monitor, or even getting the proper resolution from monitor behind an hdmi demux) , both with the opensource `amdgpu` AND the proprietary Linux drivers.

CUDA/OpenCL?