just because AMD did not spend years screwing the Linux community out of drivers.

They did, actually. It's just that they did that a long time ago. I vividly remember a time when I avoided AMD hardware because, while Nvidia's drivers were closed source, at least they worked. AMD's drivers, when they worked at all, gave severely degraded performance compared to what that same hardware was capable of in Windows.

Fortunately, those days seem to be behind us now.