The notion of being expected to pay for software that was formerly free - when Windows users aren't expected to bear those same costs - does indeed piss me off.

If I were actually using Xilinx FPGAs I'd be more pissed off. Luckily the projects that interest me currently are based around Intel, Lattice and Gowin devices.

I get what you're saying but I can understand the frustration here. Vivado licenses start at $1200/year or $5000 for a perpetual license.. Just to use software to work with hardware that you already paid for. And it's not like they are dropping support for Linux altogether, it would cost them nothing to continue supporting Linux in the free tier.

It just seems like a weird decision on AMD's part.

More like the notion of seeing different treatment between OSes. No one likes being punished for a choice that shouldn't be any of the selling party's business. That's especially true in the Linux community, which was the target of Microsoft's anticompetitive policies for decades.

That's just like when macOS users got mad when they learned they were targeted by marketing schemes to sell them more expensive stuff [1].

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155792590/orbitz-targets-mac-...