Average NVIDIA driver experience

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next week I'm finally going to get an AMD card and get rid of nvidia for good!
- next week I’m finally going to get an AMD card and get rid of nvidia for good!
  Replaced my 1080Ti with a 6700 XT when it was on sale. Couldn't be happier. All of my wake from suspend issues disappeared.
  https://i.imgur.com/qTiPKfP.gif
  
  Also getting a 6700xt ! To replace my 2060 super
- I had way more issues with my r9 390 than I've had with my rtx 3060.

Fuck them in particular

I finally switched to AMD after 3 years in Linux, and man I didn't even know I was suffering until I booted with AMD and didn't have to take care of several env variables and separate modules for hw acc
It just works
- Exactly. I did have to install mesa-freeworld drivers to get steamvr to work but ever since it's been smooth sailing

The driver installation has got a lot easier over time, still shit that you have to install a driver, still shit support for older cards. The open drivers they're building are too little too late for me. They didn't care about my slightly older GPU so I stopped buying their hardware. All AMD/Intel from here on in.
- I would also opt for an AMD CPU... my 2 cents.

I like to dunk on nvidia as much as anyone but really driver support has not been as much of a problem these last few years, other than Wayland it sort of just works for me

I only had problems on a debian based distro that was not Pop, because Nouveau was used as standard. On Arch it was just one argument to pacman, as usual. Does not mean it works well tho ... Fuck Nvidia!

Tty, what's that? You mean this blank screen?

Is it that bad? I have only experiences with AMD on garuda linux for reference and ot works mostly fine with the exception that audio occasionally stops working for one or two seckns during videos.
- It's not at all this bad. Most distros either have the driver in their repos or a simple way of adding a repo that has it, after installing it, it usually just works.
  It might potentially be this bad if you are installing from the NVIDIA webpage, but that is almost never the recommended option and I don't really see anyone with any Linux experience trying it these days (unless of course you are using a distro that doesn't have it in repos)
  
  Agreed. And then there is the combo of the most recent NVIDIA driver and Debian Kernel that doesn't work together. First time I actually had to downgrade a Kernel update though.
  But I guess this could happen with every driver
  
  When I was much younger and much less experienced (last year) I tried installing AMD drivers directly from the website and have since learned my error. I just wish sites like the Jellyfin docs didn’t recommend that you try to install from the source and instead use your distro’s repos (or use a container).
- Everything is just off with Nvidia. Steam and discord flash black but the games work. Problem is when something does go wrong it's a headache

I gave up trying to my external monitor to work without completely lagging my computer because of the NVIDIA drivers. Took me an hour of fucking around to get it working, then as soon as I make it split screen or use the external only my os framerate drops to a choppy look.

If you have a system with nVidia and you want to run Linux, just use Pop!_OS and call it a day.
- Still using the same garbage nVidia drivers in PopOS as you would with any other distro.
  
  Yes, 100% agree. All I meant is that at least you don't have to fight the install.
  
  They run them through QA at least and work directly with Nvidia to fix any issues they notice. They dont catch everything of course but its still good.
- Funny enough, popos ships with version 475, which is ancient. You still want to upgrade to 525 if you want Vulkan 1.3 support; I.e for bottles gaming, which needs Vulkan 1.3
  
  It updates to the latest immediately. I shut down my laptop (the one with nVidia) but I'm fairly certain the driver was 530+. I know it was 527 not so long ago. All you have to do is your regularly scheduled "sudo apt upgrade".
- How is it for dualbooting with Win11?
  Currently on OpenSuse Leap(on a separate hdd) because many linux recommendation articles suggested that it had the best out of box support for Nvidia n secure boot.
  But debian/ubuntu-based systems do have the advantage of being popular. More tutorials n packages readily available.
  I think I've read that Ubuntu also supports nvidia drivers, but I had read that snap is polarising, with some people saying that it slows down the startup.
  
  I don't dual boot so I cannot answer that question.
  Pop!_OS is currently based on Ubuntu so most tutorials will apply.
  Pop!_OS has a separate Nvidia iso with all the drivers baked in from the initial install.
  Snap is supported but not the default. Installs are mainly done via deb and flatpak.

*Fedora user

I want to switch to AMD but I also game in windows occasionally and it seems like the opposite experience where AMD isn't as good in windows as nvidia is. Also right now the high end AMD cards aren't as compelling compared to what nvidia is offering so it makes it harder. Hopefully the 8000 series GPUs really come in at a good price and with good performance.
- I game in both Linux and Windows with almost exclusively AMD cards (but one RTX 3090 I mostly use for ML work, but also for gaming sometimes, and one GTX 1650 Max-Q in a laptop), and the experience is basically the same between Nvidia and AMD with Windows. Driver updates are an awful process you have to go through every two or three months, and other than that, you don’t even notice a difference, day to day.
  The only difference I’ve ever noticed is that I have different options for ray tracing and upscaling between the two. Some people say DLSS is better than FSR. I say they’re both shit and make your games look bad. As for ray tracing, yeah that’s better on Nvidia, hands down. Is it worth the price hike for a comparable Nvidia card? That’s up to you.

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