Same here, I'm planning to finally upgrade my workstation GPU this gen (I've been coasting along forever with my 970). ML/DL is just a fun side benefit, not enough for me to pay the Nvidia tax and the Linux headaches that come along with it.
At work we have 20+ workstations running Nvidia on Linux, and they are such a pain in the ass. The idiots at my place don't even consider hardware-software compatibility issues before making the purchases, makes me mad.