Drivers and such are fine. Performance and such...meh.

They still don't come close to AMD, and the price isn't quite distinct enough for people to be drawn from there. Intel is also in the midst of this shakeup with Nvidia injecting cash into the business, and have said they plan to release Intel+Nvidia APU chips to compete with AMD, but that's not anytime soon.

If they found a good deal on a card, the benchmarks are decisive enough (check Phoronix) at the price point, and they don't plan on keeping it for 5 years, then sure.

If they find an AMD that is close in price but a great deal more performance, go AMD.

Improved over the last year

https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-b580-opengl-vulkan-eoy2025

How it compares to Windows I wouldn't know. I did use an Intel Arc for a while on Linux but switched to AMD for performance and idle power draw before the start of 2025. It was stable though with Steam Proton games and general day to day usage. Probably pretty good performance today relative to what it can do on Windows today compared to 2023-2024 when I was using Intel

When I first got the card, Switch emulation did not work. I think it was around mid 2024 when it started to work well

The B50 was plug and play for me. Obviously not a super powerful card compared to the competitors, however for 16GB of vram in a tiny package (with only 70W of power usage) it's unbeatable. I did play some games as well, and it was decent enough to get me by for three weeks while my 7900 was getting RMA'd.

My friend just upgraded from a GTX 1070 to an ARC B580. His motherboard was pretty old so getting bios updated with resizeable bar was some work. He also chose reinstall with Ubuntu because it was the version of Linux that was listed as officially supported. After that he has been happy with the performance increase he has gotten.

Most of the issues are gone. It’s not a top tier card but it’s not pretending to be. It’s a card for the rest of us. I got the B580 because of the media encoders and tons of VRAM for the dollar, giving me a lot to play with. I’m using it in fedora.

Be sure you upgrade the firmware with the battlemage cards. Fwupd added support for doing this but you need a fairly recent version to install the firmware updates. Bazzite currently can’t do it out of the box but you can live boot fedora and do it just fine. It fixes PCODE, mailbox and fan control issues and supposedly improves performance a little.