2y ago

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60 comments

Why is Nvidia so dismissive towards Linux? Won't they make more money by being compatible with Linux? Me for example will never buy an Nvidia cards until it surpasses or at least matches AMD in driver support.
- I mean, it seems like Nvidia barely even cares about gamers in general anymore, let alone linux users.
  
  Weird, lots of AI people use Linux too...
  
  If they're pushing into enterprise servers, like for AI, those are almost guaranteed to be running on some form of linux. I guess companies are willing pay for support contracts so their use cases will probably work pretty well.
- Nvidia makes money no matter what because they have the fastest hardware on the market
  
  They also have the "premium" name recognition like Intel
- It's sort of like WiFi and 5G mobile drivers (especially the software driven radios), a lot of proprietary stuff is in the driver that reveals hardware secrets. GPU is also regulated now for export controls from USA-derived technology. With software-driven radios, you see a lot of effort to keep people from using bands outside their national laws.
- As far as I understand, they are pretty compatible with Linux, it's just open sourcing the drivers that they don't want to do.
  
  I can promise they are VERY compatible with Linux, HPC systems use their GPUs, in a completely Linux environment. They are fantastic GPUs to use in a Linux environment performance wise.
  But we want the sauce.

Definition of look-but-don't-touch open source.
- Nvidia has always been a pain in the ass. At least we get source code now. That is why I switched to AMD/ATI years ago. I haven't kept up though if they are still good players or not.
  
  I'm sorry, but there are no good players.

So, I'm getting the distinct impression that I should not attempt a switch to Linux while I have an NVIDIA graphics card. Is that an accurate assessment?
- It works perfectly fine if you use the closed source drivers..it just needs a few extra steps.
  
  Except closed source inherently fails to be "perfectly fine," by definition.
- Not so, if you are OK using x11 you will probably have zero issues. Wayland support, however, is shit. I had a 1660 super when I switched and it was good. Just when I had two monitors with different refresh rates it get weird, x11 does not support it at all (there is some workarounds but they are workarounds). Wayland fix the issue but nvidia support for Wayland was veeery bad at the end of last year, when I switched to AMD.
  The thing about being open source is just that the community could help move things faster and would not need to wait the good will of nvidia for everithing, but nvidia is still moving slow towards open source, it does not means that they aren't doing things and fixing bugs, just they are a bit slow and stubborn
  
  I've been using the Wayfire window manager with an NVIDIA GPU and 2 monitors with different refresh rates and I don't encounter many issues. Rarely it'll still crash, but I've managed with this setup for around 6 months.
  My next GPU will probably still be AMD though.
  
  What’s the issue with 2 refresh rates? I’ve got a 1440p 144hz monitor and a 1080p 60hz monitor and I haven’t noticed any issues with them. I can tell the 144hz one is actually running over 60hz as I can see the difference when the mouse moves over to the other screen
- There's always this deluge of posts of the absolute horror of nVidia in Linux.
  Yes, nVidia is an evil capitalistic company. No they don't care much about Linux. Except when it suits them. Right now it's in the data center.
  But then, AMD doesn't care that much either. Why would they, there aren't really any Linux users. They're both soulless corporation that would sell your children's kidney's without a second thought if they could make a dollar from it.
  Now in practice, whatever you use, stuff mostly works 99.5 % of the time. There's no difference between nVidia and AMD (or intel), they all work fine.
  Don't get drawn in stupid corporate dick sucking contests, it's completely pointless. Use what you want, or what you have, it doesn't matter.
  
  The issue isn't whether the "company cares".
  It's whether they end users fix your own problems, or force you into techno-feudalism where the only way to get a problem fixed is to hope the company cares enough to fix it for you.
  The simplest example of Nvidia completely failing here is old hardware support. AMD cards doesn't have that problem because the drivers are open source and upstream. These new Nvidia drivers don't sound like they'll help - they're not maintainable and therefore not upstreamable.
  
  Tell that to my scanner.
- I can see how you would get that impression, but it is false. NVIDIA drivers are mostly fine today. They used to be abysmal, and still under the hood don’t work like everyone wants them to. The do, however, work. And for the most part they work well. Wayland can be a bit buggy, but I’ve been using kde Wayland for over a year now on an older nvidia system and I have experienced one bug that was a minor inconvenience.
- I’ve found that Linux tends to be a much better experience with an AMD GPU. The nvidia driver is mostly fine but would regularly cause my desktop to crash.
  
  Mine keeps crashing with a 7900 XTX and AMD's drivers.
  Sometimes I get greater crash and I get logged off, as if I pressed Crtl+Alt+Backspace
- I have an rtx card and the only issues I've experience is a resume from suspend/hibernate bug where it locks up. I just disable sleep/hibernate, let my monitor turn off still, and shut down my PC whenever I'm done.
  EDIT: I also have had the best luck with arch but I'm picky about pre installed software.
- I used an nvidia gaming laptop on different distros for more than 5 years without any issues. The nvidia driver works great. The only thing lagging is the noveau open source driver like mesa for amd.
- It works most of the time, but since NVIDIA is the only one fixing your drivers, chances are your bugs won't be fixed.
- Not true at all anymore. Distros like NobaraOS set things up by default (and increases gaming performance by ~4% over fedora according to Linux Experiment) so you don't really have to worry
  It's just not as convenient as AMD for power users
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/5eKSQT5mV-c
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- I'm on hybrid Intel/Nvidia, and it works fine. The discrete card isn't particularly powerful, so I don't use it much, but it works pretty much as I would expect. If you're wary, just try on a live USB. It won't harm your computer as long as you check it's working before installing, and if it works on there it should work once installed. Might be best to start with a distro that at least has a toggle for proprietary drivers in the installer though, so you don't have to do any faffing about yourself.
- Depends on your expectations, it won't be as streamlined as amd/Intel but if you are not too picky it should be enough to have a usable machine.
- every single Debian based distro would boot into a black screen if you had official updated Nvidia drivers
  So basically, a Tuesday.
  I switched out of nVidia years ago because every. single. update. this shit happened. Go into TTY2, blacklist the driver, rollback and unblacklist, rinse repeat at the next update. Trash.

I started using linux when I had an nvidia gpu, it worked alright enough. Not many drivers issues, most of my issues were age related for the gpu itself. I did swap to all AMD hardware for my new computer. The swap to AMD is nice. I did upgrade everything from my previous stuff, so no matter what I expected an increase of performance. I do notice that my resource usage is lower and general speed for mundane tasks is better.
- Nvidia drivers have some kind of stupid locking issue when it comes to creating windows, when my phone spams me notifications to pushbullet or kdeconnect it locks up half my system.
  AMD has none of that, windows pop up like nothing, kind of impressed because I'd been team green since literally forever (back when fglrx was a crashy pos).
  
  It's only been a few weeks, but yeah I noticed that I don't have to fight my windows as often. Games don't have issues with odd window layouts either.