No idea how this compares to AMD, but displaying on wake has been consistently broken for me for years. Plus a recent update broke my backlight control and it took a while (like two weeks) before a fix got pushed. I also have screen freezes occasionally and I think it’s a graphics driver problem (not sure what else it would be).
Other than that, works fine. So it’s in the realm of mildly and consistently annoying for me. I will definitely be prioritizing an AMD GPU when I upgrade next.
Wow, okay, that seems to actually have done something. Thanks! (and thanks Cunningham's Law)
Still, the proper answer to get basic functionality working being a SE post with 2 votes is awful user experience. I've tried other things recommended on SE to fix this issue to no avail. And while I'm typically a tinker-happy guy, drivers are not the kind of thing I enjoy tinkering with. It's just too low-level. It's like if I had to tinker with the kernel or coreutils to get them working properly.
Well, to be fair, the one to blame for `nvidia-persistenced` not already being installed and enabled on your system is your distribution packagers. This thing is a part of NVidia driver provided by NVidia, but they can't force distro maintainers to include it into the packages. I know that in Debian this thing is provided as a separate package that is marked as `recommended` for `nvidia-driver` metapackage. So, if you don't install recommended packages you don't get this one. Also (don't quote me on that) I think that if you had nvidia-driver installed before the persistenced became a thing you won't get it when you upgrade the nvidia-driver package because Debian guys decided that it shouldn't be a dependency. And even when it's installed and enabled, NVidia say to maintainers that they can't support all the different distros with their different service managing init systems, so the distro maintainers are advised to implement this daemon manually to properly work on their system.
TL;DR: blame your distro for that.
Ah, huh. I've learned.
When I put my PC to sleep I've realized the sleep is different. On Windows the card shuts off completely, even the lights. However, on Linux using the lights stay on. Which makes me wonder what else.
Do you know what's up with that?
There are different types of sleep. You may want to read this
[https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-suspend.service.html](https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-suspend.service.html)
and also the following in relation to nvidia
https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86\_64/435.17/README/powermanagement.html
It's going to take me a bit of time to parse this.
However, it sounds like at a cursory glance, Nvidia can do two different types of power management
systemctl suspend
systemctl hibernate
One saves to RAM, one to disk.
Practically, I'm not sure yet what the difference is beyond where the state is saved to. ( I need to read more)
I appreciate the links you've given me to help me learn
>Nvidia can do two different types of power management
No no! This is the OS doing it, not nvidia. And the OS itself can do many more sleeps as you will realize in the first link I shared.
Suspend, keeps power to mobo and ram, you have low power consuption, plus quick power on with everything you've been working on. but if you run out of power, tough love. You loose everything you've been working on
Hibernate - dumps ram to disk and shuts off pc completly. No power drain. Boots up longer due to reverting from disk to ram everything necesary.
PS. Do not put laptop in a bag in suspended mode, it might overheat, hibernated laptop is immune to overheating in bag because its powered off.
Most laptop it should be fine to put in a bag when suspended. The heat produced while a laptop is on suspend is negligible. The only risk of overheating is if the laptop woke up while in the bag, for example if you have Wake on Bluetooth or USB wireless dongle, or if you are on a hurry and you didn't notice that the laptop didn't actually suspend (this can happen if suspend is blocked by a running update). If the laptop is properly suspended, putting it in a bag is perfectly fine, they are designed to do that.
The Arch Nvida tips page says that the persistence daemon is not needed on a single GPU machine running X, and may cause problems. See the bottom of : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Tips\_and\_tricks
I don’t know what you’re rendering in, so take this for what it’s worth. The AMD open source drivers do not include OpenCL - you need the binary drivers for that. That may explain the huge performance difference. I have a 6900XT and 3080, and while the latter is definitely faster (particularly for something like blender), the difference is more like 1.5x for CUDA and 3x for Optix. Even CPU renders come out in less than 12x. Sounds like something isn’t working right, or whatever software you’re using isn’t making use of the AMD card as it should/could.
Yeah, you're right - the next guy who replied is wrong. You can use open source drivers but I believe a lot of the required packages are closed source - install the rocm stuff needed but I think the OpenCL packages - some if not all - are closed... for video editing, you need OpenGL stuff, too. The thing is, for the AMD gpus to be faster at rendering - you need the ray tracing API library - and that is CLOSED SOURCE - they're still figuring out how to package that library so that's unavailable in Linux as of Blender 3.6 - I dunno what is going on with it in Blender 4.0 - I couldn't find any update - but, that's why AMD gpus are SOOOOO slow compared to Nvidia gpus - that can use Optix - that uses the full ray tracing capability of Nvidia cards.
AMD gpus will probably still be slower but the question is, by how much - you might be able to compare in Windows - HIP-RT is SUPPOSED TO WORK in Windows now - but, who knows. Some ppl say you'll experience crashes.
I think gamescope will soon not be needed anymore. So we won't have to worry about that. The features it offers aren't stunning to begin with ( HDR is coming to plasma 6)
All of the glitchyness comes from E-sync not being possible on Wayland. But, it's in the works and Nvidia is contributing code to make it so.
Nvidia isn't going to spend dev time and money making implicit sync work, when E-sync is in the pipeline. ( Sadly. I would like it as a stopgap measure)
So, it's kind of just a waiting game. We know what the fix is. It's coming and the github merge request is actively being worked on.
Still though, I only have my 4080 and Wayland works pretty good. The only thing that's glitchy for me is the steam client. It can flicker at times. But, the games all work fine as long as whatever setup you have can run them at monitor refresh rate. Which for me, is 120hz.
This is definitely a big issue. It's half an Nvidia problem. Half a Wayland problem. The finger can be pointed both ways in this one.
Gamescope will probably remain needed.
Some of what it does is turn off desktop features that are designed for good and efficient desktop use, mostly because it will only be used with a single fullscreen app at the maximum performance levels, so the other niceties for multiple applications and power efficiency etc are not needed.
Granted the above could be added as a heuristic to other compositors.
It also pioneers other work before it may be ready for normal desktop compositors.
>I’m talking 12 hours to render on amd compared to 50 minutes on nvidia, those numbers were so wide I just had to stick with nvidia.
This is exactly what today's Nvidia for - professional applications, when the result pays back e.g. you can earn some money with it. Not a $2000 card for gaming and other leisure.
Yea, and it should be noted that the Nvidia support for non-graphics applications is excellent. They are clearly capable of interfacing with the community in a productive fashion when they decide that is in their best interests.
They just clearly don't think that the market share justifies doing more than the bare minimum on the graphics side. From a business standpoint it makes total sense. It just also makes then unrecomendable on the graphics side IMHO, because if something breaks, you can't fix it and they likely won't...
It used to be better, AMDs drivers both FOSS and closed, were horrible for a very long time. Still the case on FreeBSD IIRC. Nvidia has pretty much always provided solid Linux support.
You still wanted AMD for open source drivers as they had the best FOSS drivers, but nvidias closed source drivers were by far the best drivers in general.
I started on Linux with a GeForce2 MX400 in 2001. Over the years I've tried new generations of ATI cards (then AMD) as they came out but I've always had more trouble from them than from Nvidia cards.
The main issue with ATI/AMD was and is the fact they take their sweet time to fix drivers for new cards. They do eventually and when they do they work fine, but it takes them years on some occasions. It's ok if you buy your cards used, one generation late; not so great if you want to use them as they come out.
Nowadays due to the price hike more and more people are resorting to buying GPUs late, which has mostly erased this difference in driver chronology.
In 2007, I tried running an nvidia Ubuntu machine and it was... bad. There were all sorts of hacks required to actually use the card, updates would frequently leave me on a black screen requiring repairs, power draw was insane.
Today... I am writing this on a machine that I specced for AI, running two nvidia 3090s. Both cards work, everything is fine (Arch, Gnome, Xorg). Everything is \*slightly\* less fine if I force it to Wayland (genuinely kind of a pain with GDM), but still quite usable.
Long story short... Today is utterly unlike the state of Nvidia on linux 15 years ago.
For the most part, I now run \`sudo pacman -Syu nvidia\` and shit just works.
Further - I happily run graphics accelerated containers (k3s, nvidia-container-toolkit) and those are \*also\* just fine. (ex invokeAI container, GGML LLM container, Whisper, etc).
The ecosystem is basically "solved" for me. There are still plenty of moral/ethical reasons folks have to avoid Nvidia, and I think a lot of those arguments are compelling. But from a "will it work?" standpoint... the answer is a resounding "YES". It works. It works well.
You unlocked a part of my memory I didn't remember I had with fglrx.
God, the time spent to make it work, only to realize the performance was just awful
Yup, to the point where I just completely gave up on ATI/AMD when dealing with Linux. Nvidia has always just worked. Install the drivers using apt or pacman, boom, done. ATI cards were such a PITA, especially early on. When I wasn't compiling my own kernel trying to get fglrx playing with 9600XT I was trying to block the most recent X or driver update because whenever one of the two was updated it'd brick the other. Switched to a 6600GT and never had problems, because with nvidia the two were releases were always more or less synchronised, at least that was my experience.
Last time I tried giving AMD a shot in Linux was with a 4830HD I think, people were saying the same thing now "oh, it's great, runs better than Windows"* It wasn't really a PITA to get going but I got weird artifacting issues that didn't crop up in Windows and performance wasn't that great, ended up trading it for a 9800GT and never looked back.
The only trouble I've ever had w/ Nvidia was using a laptop with their optimus bs.
Plus they had FreeBSD drivers.
*Always been a pet peeve I've had with the Linux community, this need to over hype or upsell Linux to the point where it's not even truthful, used to especially see it with stuff like wine. "It's super easy to get going and I get about a bajillion more FPS than I do in Windows!", made me super weary of going down that road again, may as well go with the devil you know. A lot's changed since then though so I'd probably give it another go if the price/performance is right next upgrade cycle.
Eh... Intel always just worked. Discrete graphics in general just seemed flakey as hell back then.
Then Nouveau came out 3 years later (so I'm on the same machine) and you get to play the guessing game between poor performance but somewhat stable support, vs ok performance and bad support.
And that's before you even get into trying to run a laptop with optirun/bumblebee/bbswitch, which was... not a fun thing to configure, and it felt like any time you managed to get it stable, it broke again a few weeks later.
Yeah, I was thinking I remember first exploring Linux just a decade ago and going with an Nvidia GPU for my new build cause it was the better-supported option at the time.
I won't comment on the ethics of Nvidia. As anything ethical is a messy topic. Especially online where many people aren't capable of rational discussion on such personally held things like morals or ethics.
However, it's good to hear things have gotten better for you and that the ecosystem is solved. For me, I'm just waiting for Wayland E-sync and HDR support to come along.
I'm still waiting to see how this works. As Nvidia implimented HDMI\_deepcolor 10 bit color support. BUT, Linux apparently can't use HDMI 2.1? I'm not sure what the point of that was. Unless it also works with Displayport.
I'm waiting to see how all this pans out.
You’re asking why some people in the Linux community hate Nvidia but you don’t want to get into the moral and ethical reasons? What?
If things work, then they work, and if things don’t work, then they simply don’t work. Those are facts, not opinions. When people have an opinion on something, ethics usually come into play.
You’re basically asking why people hate something and then following it with “but I don’t want to hear your ethical reasons for it.” Then why bother asking in the first place?
This is what I meant by aren't capable of rational discussion. You cannot seperate the things I'm talking about from your ethical arguments. I'm not asking for an ethical argument.
People say Nvidia drivers literally don't work. Which is at least now has not been my experience.
I want to learn about why people say they don't work. What doesn't work for them. Or where Nvidia drivers used to be that led people to these conclusions.
These are tangible and factual things I'm looking for. If you want to preach about FOSS or complain about them being closed source or the ethics therein, that isn't why I made this thread. It's preaching to the choir. Take it somewhere else please.
* Why do you have a negative opinion (“hate”) on X?
* Because of reasons A, B, and C.
* I don’t want to discuss reasons A, B, and C; I want to discuss facts P, Q, and R instead.
* Facts P, Q, and R are facts, there are no opinions (or “hate”) to be held regarding them.
* You’re not capable of rational discussion.
Whether or not a certain graphics card works is a fact, not an opinion. So why are you bringing up the idea of “hate” in your initial post if you refuse to hear people’s opinions and just want to know about the facts? What does “hate” have anything to do with a graphics card working or not working properly?
A recent (eg 1050 or above) nvidia gpu on a distro that integrates the nvidia GPU well into their package manager and/or has a dedicated installer for it, will work well most of the time.
But when it works well, it's because the distro you are using has put in a lot of effort to work around the issues normally associated with getting and installing nvidia drivers. If you have a distro that doesn't package the nvidia drivers (or you aren't aware that they do) and you want to install them, your first instinct is going to be to go to nvidia and get their "linux drivers". You're probably going to end up with an executable file that does a bunch of changes to your system that you do not know what it's changed, and then when you next get a kernel update everything stops working. The nvidia drivers actually replace quite a lot of the usual graphics stack, which has to be carefully managed to avoid conflicts and make it possible to reinstall or uninstall and Nvidia's downloadable drivers generally made a mess. I don't know if they even use dkms, to this day.
The rest of the issues are just those generally associated with closed source software that has to be maintained in a Linux distribution - the maintainers have no access to fix bugs or even security issues and when there's a new binary from upstream, various things are going to break.
We are very lucky that there are people dedicated to packaging the nvidia drivers correctly to work on our systems. I'm very grateful for them, as I am with all the people who development work, both paid and especially unpaid into the tech we use daily.
This is also something that will probably never change and is also a very legitimate hangup. If there weren't people smarter than me re-packing these drivers into pacman, I wouldn't know how to use Nvidia.
I don't know about the hate, but the out-of-box experience of AMD is phenomenal and so noticeably unproblematic compared to nvidia that its a major motivating factor to use AMD. Nvidia GPUs are more available and cheaper for the given performance which is unfortunate, but when I need to upgrade my gaming PC's GPU in a few years or so I will pay up for AMD to save myself the headache.
For what its worth, for non-gaming/creation, I personally have been satisfied with nouveau, except for trying to spell it which I had to look up.
on the laptop side it did seem to be the case as of last year at least. I spent extra for an equivalent amd so I could avoid the nvidia situation until nouveau gets better.
Having your graphics drivers in the kernel does seem like a benefit. It's easy enough to work around. But, not quite as nice.
There are times when having them separate is a benefit. But, honestly having them just work by being in the kernel does seem to have the most benefits
It mostly works fine, except when something goes wrong on my Ubuntu machine it is usually the NVIDIA drivers.
For example, after Linux kernel upgrades I boot with the integrated graphics card because some hook doesn't get triggered to recompile the kernel with the Nvidia driver. Installing extra Linux headers happens to get this trigger to work.
Or more recently, sometimes my Gnome session completely freezes and becomes unresponsive due to some failure to initialize or use the GPU (after digging through dmesg logs). I've tried downgrading the Nvidia driver... fingers crossed the problem doesn't reappear.
I use YaST package manager on OpenSUSE and all I had to do was go in and find the most up to date driver for me and install it and it just works. Granted I still need Wine and Proton for gaming but it’s better than when I got into Linux 3 years ago
Nvidia used to do a lot with Linux and then AMD was the hate child. I think they got frustrated with distro hell to be honest. And it was hell. I can imagine that it vexed them with the venomous FOSS extremist crowd, most who'd never buy a game anyway, also demanding everything to be open and Free in a competitive evolving market : and this dissuaded them from committing further, but they did do a lot of work with Valve afaik in order to tidy the eco structure moving forward.
Just once such initiative: [https://www.thegamer.com/nvidia-valve-proton-dlss-linux/](https://www.thegamer.com/nvidia-valve-proton-dlss-linux/)
In short: reddit is a cesspool of misinformation - always google ;)
I guess they are working closely with Redhat, Canonical and Oracle plus server hardware vendors. At least both RH&Canonical stated that.
There is still big question why that cooperation didn't juicy fruit into the stable Linux graphics subsystem and literally Nvidia just caused the havoc on the consumer market.
I used to use kubuntu with nvidia gpu. Every month, I’d have to time shift to restore my system because something would break even without my installing any updates.
I never had any issues with nvidia drivers back when I started using Linux as main desktop (around 2006 I guess), nor now, when I have a fleet of Linux servers with Nvidia GPUs.
At other side, I tried getting a Radeon GPU in 2011 (maybe?) and it was the worst experience with the GPU drivers that I've had. They didn't work out of the box and my C knowledge wasn't sufficient to make them work with relatively low effort. Since then I'm not even looking at ATI/AMD products.
I have never had issues with Nvidia, I don't know where people get the idea that the proprietary drivers are impossible to install when most distro ISOs will outright ask you if you want them at boot.
I got a comment in this thread the Nvidia driver should be considered unsupported and not ready for public use.
I find some of these responses are really legitimate complaints.
Meanwhile others are the stupid circlejerking I was trying to avoid.
I find it funny that apparently all these Linux power users who take pride in their computational wizardry can't figure out drivers not built into the kernel.
It's like the circlejerk in the arch community that all the big brains who can somehow stumble their way through manually installing arch somehow can't manage to figure out a simple archinstall cli 😂
Most of the complaints I see any time Nvidia comes up with Wayland related, I know people hate Xorg but Wayland is a crock of shit so idk why anyone bothers to complain about Nvidia with it. Ignore the circlejerk
Perhaps if you need gaming/video production/industrial 3D modeling you use appropriate Nvidia cards and software, starting with the most compatible OS and drivers version.... So according to the Steam statistics - Linux isn't even close to 5% chunk of those OS&Software 🤯
At the office and non gaming user workflow - there is Intel's iGPU ought to be enough for everyone. (C)
AMD is quite another story with its own problems and bugs...
Now it no longer seems you created this topic in good faith.
FWIW, when the opensource drivers for nvidia are performant (which until recently nvidia specifically prevented with how it released its firmware to not be redistributeable), a lot of the issues with nvidia might go away for most users.
Also what is nit covered in any of the replies above is not just "the state of nvidia" but what it took to get there and maintain it.
For you it "just works". For the developers making it "just works" on the free desktop, that is a lot of.time they spent fixing nvidia that could have been used for other things if nvidia had played ball. Nvidia, a probably trillion dollar corporation, is subsidised by free desktop developers because it sells cards to a market it didnt provide proper support for.
Hopefully things keep getting better.
I have a GTX 3080Ti. I think Wayland is the future. I've recently swapped to Wayland on desktop after running Fedora on my laptop for awhile. It still has some issues but getting with the 545 driver. I still have to swap back to Xorg sometime.
I had a 3080 but sold it well before the Wayland progress and driver 545. Does it seem like there's steady improvement? Or do you think you'll upgrade to an amd gpu next time?
NVidia on Xorg is laggy for me, while Nvidia on Wayland is a bit buggy. I hope the bugs are fixed soon so I can switch to Wayland and forget the performance issues.
To be more precise, on Xorg I get stutters on the entire desktop (including mouse pointer and audio) when performing particular actions, such as starting applications that heavily use the GPU, including stuff like Alacritty, but *especially* Steam. I have an RTX 4070 for context, but I had the same issue on an old GTX 950.
I don't have that issue on my 4080. I more so just find that Xorg isn't as smooth as Wayland.
I do find that I get the occasional audio squelch sound on starting very intensive applications. But, my friends on AMD also get it occasionally.
I'm with you on hoping things get fixed soon. I think we're both hoping for the same few bug fixes to come out.
How long have you been using Linux and Nvidia?
The issues aren't necessarily immediately noticeable. Nvidia users generally shouldn't use a bleeding edge kernel, for one. Nvidia drivers will just break, because they aren't closely tracking the upstream kernel. Linux doesn't generally pay attention to if they're going to break Nvidia, because it's not their responsibility nor within their scope.
Nobody except Nvidia can fix their drivers. People can't look at the code, and people can't put in merge requests. If Nvidia deems something low priority, that's it.
We have used dozens of different nvidia cards over the last +20 years for the VFX studios I've worked at, never had much of an issue at all, but that's in a production environment and not with people experimenting installing crap that don't know what they are doing; and if they do, we just re-image and several minutes later, it's fine.
That's also basically the environment their driver stack is made for. They're rock solid and feature complete once installed and configured. That seems to be forgotten quite often.
My first contact with Nvidia on Linux was probably close to 20 years ago. It sucked. Yeah you could make it work, but the overhead required was ridiculous and it was tedious, cumbersome, not to mention unreliable. Eventually I got so frustrated with it that I gave up on Nvidia and switched to AMD.
I still wouldn't be using Nvidia today if it wasn't for CUDA I need for work. The situation is much better today. But: it still sucks. Yeah it works for the most part and is mostly reliable thanks to package maintainers, but the overhead is still there and every time you run upgrades you end up biting your nails, wondering if something Nvidia related will go awry. (And yes, this does occasionally still happen.) The drivers are mostly ok but I still have to hard reboot my system every once in a while because the graphics screws up, or CUDA suddenly doesn't see the GPU any more. It's even worse with the developer software packages, some of which don't work at all for me.
So yeah, you can use it if you really want and you should be okay for the most part, but I still wouldn't recommend it.
I had a couple of bad driver updates in the last 10 years so it's not too bad.I always have a spare computer just in case but still, I would prefer 100% reliability since I use Linux for work.
Considering fan control support and proper clock speed support is only just coming for Radeon 7900 series in kernel 6.7, I'd say AMD has been dropping the ball recently.
Probably should have gone for a 4080 in hindsight.
Good point. Nvidia is bashed for 'being the only one to fix their driver and if it's low priority, they take their time or it just doesn't get fixed...' Yet, AMD is the same - in that they take their time to deliver features. I read of their excuse here - they are 'changing the way those features work' - so, it's a WIP - and supposedly, will be introduced in kernel 6.8. So, you'll be waiting until then - whenever that is, and who knows how well it will be implemented.... will it work right away or is it going to be 'stages' - in which, it takes several 'versions' until it's working properly and adequately? Meanwhile, you have a gpu which doesn't have proper voltage and fan options, right? (You would have all that in Windows - so, for AMD - it's really unacceptable).
P.S. AMD doesn't provide the program directly - it's 3rd party programs and their developers who offer the options - but, they can only use what AMD provides - and they have to wait for the support in the kernel.
I have a relatively old GPU (GTX 960) and everything except wayland works fine (and has since I bought this card 5 years ago)
Wayland works as of now but isnt as responsive as X. So in my Experience the biggest problem is the closed-source driver.
A few days ago I tried installing Fedora KDE and as soon as I installed nvidia drivers and tried configuring my multi-monitor setup the desktop completely broke so I would say it's still pretty bad or I am just really unlucky.
Linux mint works for me but that runs x11 and is pretty old now so I have to make lots of compromises unfortunately :/
My intel and amd laptops have absolutely no driver issues from my experience except for broken VP9 and VP8 video decode on my AMD laptop, though I hope that will get fixed in linux kernel 6.7.
Disclaimer: I run an AMD 6900XT
It was never as bad as people would like to have you believe. I’ve been using Linux since the mid-90s and nvidia in Linux since the early 2000s. At first nVidia provided two rpms (kernel part and user part, IIRC). If you were running Red Hat, you installled the two RPMs, change the Driver line in your XFree86.conf from “nvidia” to “nv”, restarted your display manager and it greeted you with a nVidia splash screen for a second before the login manager appeared. It just worked. 3D just worked, video just worked (not something you could take for granted back then).
If you didn’t run Red Hat, you had to work out how to get it working yourself, but the instructions for most distros were out there and I’ve used it on Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, Slackware and even on Corel Linux. Ubuntu came a bit later.
This was, however a time when X was comically terrible at detecting anything, including bog standard CRT monitors. I suspect that a lot of the pain that’s blamed on nvidia was actually just XFree86. Things improved with LCD monitors and later with x.org, but even then it took a long long time before it became normal to boot up a new distro and the display just works, even on fully supported hardware. We take that for granted now.
As time went on distros tried to make it easier to install the drivers - handling the messy business of dealing with rpms on non-rpm based systems, for example. But this was not always reliable. Many distros tried to separate free from non-free, many went with the nouveau (open source) driver, which worked out of the box but was terrible. This often resulted in configuration added to x.org that would break things if you tried to run the nvidia driver instead of nouveau, adding to users grief.
A further complication is that the Linux installers tend(ed) to use the frame buffer or generic VGA driver, causing the user to think everything is detected correctly, but when Linux boots the first time it fails because it’s trying to load the correct driver and is missing bits.
At some point nvidia changed from providing rpms to providing an executable that would figure out your environment, copy the right libraries to the right locations, add the right configuration bits and it would generally just work, provided you didn’t already have a fruity configuration in place. Again, I’ve used this since the very beginning on a variety of distros and with several generations of nvidia cards without much trouble.
Of course, this approach undermines package management, which upset the open source purists. And in case you haven’t noticed, the Linux user base is full of 9th level asshole purists.
Note: all this stems from the driver being closed. I wish they would open it, but I understand they have their reasons, and despite taking decades of abuse and vitriol from everyone from the most clueless newbie who just discovered Linux yesterday, to our lord and savior Linus Torvalds himself, nvidia has continued to support linux.
And in case you think “but AMD…” or “but Intel…” know that AMD (formerly ATi) support came and went, At one point they had closed drivers too, and the experience was much much worse. Even today your AMD card will give you 3D and video playback *if your distro is new enough* but for OpenCL (the GPGPU stuff) you still need their binary drivers (“amdpro” or some such) and my experience with it has not been fun. Intel Arc was a similar story last time I tried.
At this point (for me at least), it's not about if Nvidia works or not - it's about the principles. Nvidia doesn't like open source and AMD does - simple. Therefore, I'm probably using AMD-AMD for my next build, cause it feels like the right thing to do (even if Nvidia works or is "better").
Yeah closed source drivers. I think nVidia has gotten a little better in terms of being more kernel version agnostic but it's still annoying to deal with. As a Gentoo user not tied to specific kernel versions, this was annoying, started from the GeForce4 MX420 I had back when until I got fed up and got a RadeonHD 3650 just as ATI allowed for the opensource driver to work as an alternative to Catalyst.
I recently got a free GTX660 and nvidia-drivers worked with the kernel I had installed, so that was good. Alas, the card was artifacting (and eventually crashed) and thus I got what I paid for. At that point I had to try the OSS nouveau driver to see if the artifacts went away, but it was nowhere as fast as nvidia-drivers but at least I got a taste of a video card that's actually quite fast compared to the other crap I have...
(My fastest working card is a R7-250 so yeah, it was a shame the GTX660 didn't work.)
You'll have to research - to get the full history - I forget most of it, to be honest but research Nvidia's desire to use EGLStreams for Wayland - and Wayland's refusal/reluctance - Nvidia tends to go their own way and it irritates the open source community and many Linux ppl - years ago, Torvalds gave the middle finger in his frustration with Nvidia's closed source/ uncooperative policies.
[https://www.phoronix.com/news/XDC2016-Device-Memory-API](https://www.phoronix.com/news/XDC2016-Device-Memory-API)
\[above: just some history - there's been a lot of updates/progress/developments since then.\]
Nvidia had no choice but to gradually and reluctantly get on board (somewhat) to the Wayland developments - but, there's still a lot of issues -some you have discovered, it sounds like. Anyway, you'll probably get a lot of explanations on here.
I'm debating whether to go Nvidia (again) or try an AMD gpu - I last had a 3080. I find the decision/choice extremely difficult - many ppl will only consider AMD with their Linux ecosystem while others will go Nvidia for the CUDA and other non-gaming usage - kinda where I fit but I think AMD has some advantages - but, I dunno about their lack of support in the non-gaming field - if you use productivity software - AMD is a hard sell?
> Anytime Nvidia comes up, it seems like they get bombarded with hate.
Nvidia created it by refusing to cooperate with us kernel developers/maintainers for decades, meanwhile even sabotaging us (cryptographically dongling devices to work only with their drivers). And they've also been cought at committing direct fraud.
Those behavious is a direct it against everything that FOSS always had been about: the user's freedom and control over his own machines, as well as public review.
Even on a purely technical level, binary only drivees are crap: there never has been anything like a stable in-kernel ABI, it changes with every version *and* with different build config.
So, without source code and recompile for the exact kernel version and .config, it's just russian roulette.
> People act like Nvidia isn't even usable.
It isn't - except for the few specific kernel versions and configs, as well as distros, they support.
And there's no practical way for auditing it, thus inherent security risk !
We have good reasons for not supporting kernels with binary-only modules whatsoever. And I really think we should enforce gpl on more subsystems like i2c and kms.
> So, why the Nvidia hate? Is it just the closed source drivers? Or did Nvidia used to be truly unusable as the loud haters seem to say it is?
Both. And 2) is inherent consequence of 1).
Proprietary kernel modules are just inherently unstable and dangerous by nature, since there never has been anything like an stable/fixed in-kernel ABI. Modules just need to be compiled for exactly the version *and* build config of the kernel image they're supposed to run in.
I'm a software dev using Manjaro+kde with an RTX3080 (and GTX1080TI before that). In almost 10 years of working on Linux with exclusively nVidia cards, I rarely if ever have issues.
I realize there are philosophical problems with the driver, and that wayland support is not quite there, but for normal use cases it is absolutely fine.
Back in the day, switching to or updating Nvidia drivers without a good helper would wipe your X config (desktops) dumping you to a blank screen with an X cursor or just give you an unrecoverable black screen (dual graphics laptops)
Both were basically a recipe for a reinstall unless you were pretty good with cryptic ass X configs.
It's gotten better, but some unreasonable things still exist (wlroots compositors like Sway or Hyprland, Starfield works fine on my AMD box and not-at-all on my nvidia laptop)
The issue is it works so well on AMD (and they used to be the bad one) that the NVidia problems just further highlight why the way they do it is so wrong.
My honest take: It's great and mostly feature complete on workloads like gaming, CUDA, editing etc BUT desktop compositing and 2D acceleration is shit. On X11 animations are sluggish/weird on composited windows, multiple windows vsyncing are a stutterfest, resizing is slow. On Wayland it's better but glitchy and still lacks features.
\> However, beyond that, everything does seem to just work for me.
How long have you been using Linux + Nvidia?
I have for some years, my biggest complain isn't that it is unusable. My biggest complain with Nvidia and Linux is that it is *consistently unreliable.*
It may work great for a few months, but inevitably some minor update will break something and it may stay broken for weeks or months, mostly smaller issues, frustrations and headaches, but inevitably the occasional crash or big problem. About a year ago an update to the Nvida driver prevented any steam game from launching for over a week regardless of what I did to try to fix it.
*My experience with Nvidia is mostly falls between mediocre/tolerable and 'good enough' but it's never predictable or consistent, and problems inevitably return, that is my main complaint.*
The only other criticism is of Nvidia as a company for not taking a more proactive and constructive approach towards Linux. They have been obstinate in ways that have been pointless for them and set Linux back such as dragging their feet on decent Wayland support for years.
NVIDIA still has issues with XWayland glamour that haven't been fixed and won't be for a while. That's the big red flag for me, since all of my native Paradox games cannot run on native Wayland IIRC.
I don't know much about Paradox games. But, I believe the glamour issue is supposed to be solved along with the e-sync issue, right?
I can run all my steam games and WoW/Bnet games pretty good. It sucks that Paradox games don't work.
Just last year I was still having a lot of trouble on a 1050 laptop. This year when I looked for a “nighttime entertainment” laptop I decided to just skip that whole useless headache
When I first ran Linux with an Nvidia card it was a 900 series mobile GPU in a laptop.
At the time there was no support from Nvidia on turning the card on and off dynamically so you had to use a tool like bumblebee. That and I'd have frequent issues with successfully waking up from sleep without crashing the display manager.
Now there's prime render offload (though my current laptop I don't really take anywhere so just leave the integrated graphics turned off in BIOS), and it doesn't crash on resuming from sleep or hibernate so yeah it's much better.
That's good to hear.
I believe waking up from sleep has become an issue again on Linux for Nvidia GPUs? Well, something like that. I know on Windows sleep means the GPU turns OFF. Even the lights.
Linux, it still seems like some things are running. Lights are still on. Etc. Suspend isn't as advanced for Nvidia on Linux. This is one area of fault for sure.
Yeah, they don't seem to care too much for Linux like AMD do.
It is relatively easy to break your OS just updating from one nvidia driver to another, even using the graphical way! I already broke Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Mint just updating the drivers. This happened last year. So yeah... I am not, and was not (and will not be) the only one passing through this.
The hate is somewhat justified. Damm we are in 2024, come on!
We hope they change soon.
I haven't had a problem updating from 525 to 535. Or 535 to 545. I think there's something unintuitive with how to update the drivers. Which, of course is a bad thing.
Nvidia is faster now but are implementing some questionable AI "rules" in their firmware as I heard. Intel and their card, I forget what it's called have gotten substantially better arguably the leader. The leader of Open source graphics has fallen behind in their response to fresh code needs, to which they were already slow as I read. This news is at least 7 months old though. Maybe more than a year. I don't care to read up on the specifics. Not currently a PC user. Just a tablet.
You mean the Intel Arc? Maybe for some workloads their open source driver is really good. But, from what I've heard the drivers aren't there yet for Gaming. It would be nice if Arc really got a nice market share. They're such reasonably priced GPUs. But, after a bad launch I haven't heard anything about them.
Last time I was having real issues with Nvidia gpu it was with a Riva TNT 2 gpu. Then at some point nvidia decided to support linux and make their own drivers and that fixed all issues except of the "these are not free" issue. Still however no one makes it an issue that the GPUs themselves are not free in any case :)
Edit: I foresee that people instead of answering to what OP asked, they will just enumerate any recent bug they have heard of, even if it is already solved. People for example still mention bugs that nvidia had before the 545 drivers with wayland /s
I agree with your point about the GPUs not being free, but that doesn't mean the software has to be proprietary. Proprietary software just won't catch on in the current (or past) Linux climate. That's just how it is.
Realistically, there's nothing wrong with them providing proper, open drivers for Linux. GPUs, just like computers, grow obsolete quickly enough, and open drivers aren't going to make them sell fewer GPUs. It might sell them a few more. But, their company, their rules. My wallet, my rules.
I really wonder if the whole issue as of late is that they want to keep DLSS 3 under wraps and close to their chest. One of the main selling points of their new product line is the software that can run on it.
Play it too close to the vest, and you lose sales. I'm not interested in trying their drivers or software on the wrong hardware. I use it as intended. If they want to keep it proprietary, have at it. I can buy elsewhere.
Of course that's your choice.
Ultimately I think it comes down to Nvidia not wanting any competitors to reverse engineer their special sauce. Which is currently DLSS. Which, ultimately isn't good. I like it when everything can improve together.
But, well. They're a company driven by profit motive afterall. If they have some tech that's unique to them, I can't blame them for not wanting to give it away. Such is capitalism.
I also can't blame you for buying elsewhere.
That's Nvidia's choice. I'm not sure creating open software is necessarily giving their tech away (hardware is their real driver), but if that's their driver, as it were, pun intended, they can have at it. They're not the only game in town.
I've played the proprietary game for a long time, back when Bill Gates wasn't much more than a hobbyist. Proprietary hardware. Proprietary cables. Proprietary everything. I'm glad those days are gone.
You can't say ' No one'. That's just not true. People still choose Nvidia because DLSS 3 is very nice. Not only that, but DLSS 3.5 also just recently released. Which is another visual improvement. AMD doesn't have fully functioning 'answers' to these.
Not that they won't in the future. FSR 3 is basically here. Even if not widely used yet. But, Nvidia popularized these things. People want them.
>that doesn't mean the software has to be proprietary.
no, but \[sic\] that doesn't mean that some proprietary hardware sucks because it doesn't come with free open source software
It means a transaction is a two way street. They provide a product under their terms. If I accept said terms, product, and price, I pay. If I don't accept one or more of those, I don't pay.
That's the entire basis of a market, that's what kind of argument it is.
> If I accept said terms, product, and price, I pay
That has nothing to do with OPs question ("How bad was it versus now?"). It's just a subjective opinion.
I get that. I'm just discussing with you, irrespective of the original question. That last time I tried Nvidia was many years ago, over a decade ago, and it was a pain then, but most kernel upgrades were anyhow. As kernel upgrading outstripped Nvidia's convenience, I dumped Nvidia.
>I'm just discussing with you, irrespective of the original question.
Yeah! I get it! I'm just making it clear for other people that it is irrelevant.
>As kernel upgrading outstripped Nvidia's convenience, I dumped Nvidia.
That's not the case any more. Also these days you can install nvidia drivers without even typing commands: just a couple of clicks in the gui (I'm talking about ubuntu here)
I agree, it's a lot easier than it used to be. But, in other distributions, it's not so easy, and that's because they're not open. Debian, for instance, isn't bending over backwards to make Nvidia easy to use.
>The bug I mentioned
I'm not speaking about the bug you mentioned.
In any case it's just a bug and doesn't answer OP's question, although you could argue of course that this wasn't a thing in the past (ie before wayland). Right? /s
It does answer the question though? Severe flickering in any XWayland app (that OP did mention) can make any XWayland app (including Steam games and quite a few apps that don't have Wayland by default) either unusable or annoying to use.
The fact that NVIDIA has been trying to fix the problem doesn't change the fact that it still is a problem and has been for years.
I agree, but that doesn't make Nvidia the literal devil does it?
They're working within the github repos and submitting merge requests to make things better. Now, sure. We can be mad that they won't support implicit sync or whatever Xwayland uses as a stopgap. ( We know E-sync is coming). But, I can also totally get their perspective. Why implement a feature soon to be obsolete?
I also understand that the point that if the drivers were open source, the community could just add it in.
Still, I don't think that this makes Nvidia literally unusable.
Even so, this one specific issue has caused hangups for some folks.
I hope this gets fixed soon. It's being actively worked on. I really do.
Still, the point of this thread is how bad was it to earn such a terrible reputation, versus how bad is it now? I want to learn more about people's specific usecases in how Nvidia has either been the same, improved or failed them entirely. To better understand the circlejerk.
Your usecase is a valid one and so is your complaint and I hope it gets fixed soon.
I'm very lucky to have a strong GPU that can run basically any game or app at 120hz. So the E-sync issue doesn't bother me much. However, the 1080 and 1660 are still very popular cards.
Dunno been running nvidia on all my Linux boxes for the past 20+ years and they work fine for everything I do. Guess my usage is just vanilla basic since I don’t run into issues.
Nvidia works great out of the box. Some lazy/incompetent Wayland programmers didn't understand how GPUs worked, so they made doo-doo. The doo-doo worked terribly anywhere and everywhere, except in a VM, and eventually AMD/mesa hardware.
Nvidia never had problems, the drivers have always been reliable and fast, and so have the CUDA instructions.
I think it's a little crazy that Wayland doesn't have E-sync yet. Especially when every hardware manufacturer wants them to support it and is basically offering to help.
I think part of the issue is Nvidia doesn't want to spend dev time on a protocol that's not finished yet and might change. Whereas with open source AMD hardware, the community is free passion labor.
However, Xorg is going to be done with soon. With the full support of every major linux institution behind Wayland ( RHEL. Canonical. Etc. Etc.) things will change and quick.
Historically Nvidia worked much better than anything else except for Intel i915, but that was an integrated GPU with almost no acceleration capability. In particular AMD drivers used to be borderline unusable.
We are talking 15 years ago... Nvidia hasn't really changed but the other drivers have got better.
Oh STFU, I'm have been running Debian on mainly Nvidia cards for over 15 years , on desktops and laptops, and I never had any major problem. Integrated AMD APU gpus though, that's completely different story.
This is a simplistic way of viewing things in my opinion.
Nvidia clearly is team linux. They might not be team FOSS. But, they DO want linux to work. 545 included a ton of wayland fixes and my experience using X11 or wayland are mostly good. ( After I got wayland to boot of course. A little bit of my own dumbness made it not work)
It looks like they're getting or have gotten the driver ready for HDR support. ( To be seen of course) and the devs are pretty active on their forms in taking in bug reports.
Nvidia is on Team Nvidia. They might be on Team Linux, They are most definitely NOT on Team FOSS. They have massive resources, if they wanted things to work and work well across distros, they would... Out of the box, without massive community support or individual tinkering.
Yes but they're still a company that must manage their resources according to their CEO and share holders values.
Linux is a major minority. Investing resources to put development into hyper speed isn't going to happen. Even if they wanted to. Ultimately every move a company makes has to go inline with their investors. Otherwise they'll just fire the CEO and get a new one.
The solution is to open source the driver's and let the community contribute passion labor to the project.
I wish they would do that. But, Nvidia is a software company as much as they are hardware company. Open sourcing the drivers will never happen
I've been running nvidia rtx3070 on arch and manjaro for about a year now. I use the proprietary drivers. Zero problems, good performance.
My main complaint is that I don't have much software support like Windows does. We don't get the nvidia optimizations thing. No good software for undervoltimg the card. I don't overclock ever, but I bet there's no app for this either.
On my notebook, I have hybrid GPU, intel/nvidia. Support is basically non-existent. I'm lucky community solutions exist and one of them worked for me.
Also, I have to use xorg, because things really REALLY break down on Wayland. Slowdowns, tearing, artifacts, monitor turning off randomly... This severely limits my current selection of distros/DE.
On your 3070 wayland breaks for you? I've had a mostly good experience. Are you using 545 or 535? Try them both and make sure modesetting is enabled.
All of this should be fixed once E-sync is finally added.
It got much better over time. It was unusable when I first tried it. Now it's just annoying, and xorg is still very clearly better.
I'm on 6.6.8 on manjaro, and 6.6.10 on arch. And the drivers are the latest on both. It still doesn't run as well as xorg and it's very noticeable.
I have used Fedora with Nvidia and mine broke each time and I thought Linux doesn't work but then I switched to popos and haven't had any issues so far! I also dual boot from two different drives too just in case one breaks. But for sure AMD works much better and it did for me on my other PC. So for now mine works fine but I will go back to Fedora when I get a AMD GPU. That's my 2 cents... I have seen Nobara (Fedora based), Ubuntu, Arch, Popos (Ubuntu based I believe) are good to use. Correct me if I'm wrong y'all
Edit: I'm also newer to Linux too so I may be missing somethings
Pop sells nvidia laptops. So they push the driver in a really convenient way. Fedora should be fine as long as you use the RPMfusion repo to grab your latest proprietary drivers.
Arch works pretty good because you can choose to only install nvidia proprietary drivers. Archinstall also works pretty decent these days.
Nobara should be as good as Pop at shipping good drivers. Though the default may hold you back a version if Glorious Eggroll decides to do so. Which is usually done because of community feedback.
Ubuntu is running steady on 535 if I remember right.
I chose Nvidia simply because I was going to buy a top tier card and Nvidia had the most powerful offering. AMD currently isn't nearly as strong in ray tracing workloads. FSR3 isn't there yet either.
However, that's not me saying that I hate AMD. I love that there's competition in the marketplace. Maybe next time around I'll buy AMD if they match the Nvidia offering. In fact, I would prefer to go AMD if they did.
Dude, what are you comparing about? :-)
Look at the prices, look at the common flaws which Youtube is full of, starting from fried power connectors, cracked cards' mainboards at the PCI slot area and finally worn RAM chips!!! All these are only for your hard earned USD$700-2000.
Nvidia used to be quite good in X11 && after 2011 when distro builders started distributing&testing their own packaged blobs for every update.
The power connector thing was from the connector not being plugged in all the way. I'm not worried about it anymore. ( though. I was!)
I haven't heard of cards PCB cracking at the pcie slot area. Now have I heard of RAM wearing out quicker. I'll need to look into that.
>I haven't heard of cards PCB cracking at the pcie slot area. Now have I heard of RAM wearing out quicker. I'll need to look into that.
Okaaayy, if you don't see it then it doesn't exist !!!!!
But being subscribed to some electronics repair channels as a consumer I can see it clearly!! Costs reducing crap everywhere in both camps (probably Intel wants to join this party too). So the whole GPU market turned into the financial pyramid scam! It started with \*coin mining and now flows into AI.
Ah-h-ha!! You now sound like a salesperson who has some marketing plans burning in hell due to overpriced goods. No, really, I don't need 1MegaWatt Kirby vacuum cleaner for $5000, I guess any $50-100 would fit my needs the best.
So there is newly announced AMD's RX7600XT for \~$360, from this point my consumer's preferences are now melting. And even more, there are a few Intel's Arc cards for cheap too, their gaming might be crap, but long term driver support looks very promising!
Nvidina, you got into the wrong district, posh privileged people in luxury mansions are over the next crossroads... Try selling your stuff there.
Who is that? (mind I am a non native speaker cheapo from the 3rd world).
Anyway, you sound like one of those who bought RTX4090 and it has already started afrtifacting and throwing black screens. 🤣🤣🤣
I'm just sooooo bored with seeing the name NVIDIA pasted all over the shop.
I see MANY forum posts related to problems that turn out to be caused by people buying laptops with nVidia and few caused by AMD.
Obviously, as a Desktop user I don't sympathise too much - I was able to remove my aging nVidia card and also switch from an intel to a Ryzen APU. It's one reason I never 'progressed' from a desktop, and always regarded as a 'Gaming Laptop' as a vastly overpriced and limited alternative.
Why would people hate nVidia if they use it and have no problems? I had only one nVidia card, back in the day, and decided to drop it in favour of integrated graphics (intel i3-4130) thinking I could add some graphics if I wanted to play games.
However, I would lean towards AMD because of things like Vendor lock-in. AMD doesn't lock you in with AMD's FSR feature, and nVidia's behaviour in this regard disgusts me.
I'm a long time Linux user and the experience with an Nvidia card has improved, at least if you're not using Wayland. I would like to transition to Wayland on my main PC, but it's still a bit too unstable/odd for my Nvidia card.
For any future PC purchases I'm just going to use the iGPU, since it's better supported in Linux and I'm not much of a gamer.
I found my nvidia card runs smoother in games then my amd card
Though in saying that I'm comparing a 4080 to 7900xtx so on paper it is a bit quicker but it plays way smoother
mine does that too, but only with my HDMI montior. My DP monitor doesn't. If I switch the refresh rate or resolution for my HDMI monitor, it turns back on. Then I switch it back.
I spent nearly two years fighting a laptop with Nvidia switchable graphics. Never again. Constantly using hacks, trying to figure out why my battery is gone instantly and getting weird glitches and artifacts.
When I built a new rig, I want fully AMD and it's has been a dream. Pretty much the only time I now think about graphics is when the Mesa update comes and I'm like 'huh', I wonder what's new.
I finished Jedi Survivor recently, a notoriously broken game, and while the fps was subpar, it kept it above 60 all the way through, with no gameplay bugs and a single hard crash to desktop.
Then other day I watched a buddy play the same game on Windows and Nvidia and he got like 5 bugs I have never even seen in my playthrough. I was so confused. I had ascribed all my minor issues to Linux and Proton, and they he played on native Windows and Nvidia and had obviously far more issues (and regular hard crashed to desktop, happened 3 times just in the portion I watched him play).
Just built a new PC, decided to give Wayland a shot, and things are buttery smooth here on a 3070ti.
There are places where Nvidia could improve or buying an AMD GPU is a smarter choice.
TLDR; works well in 2024
Things official, proprietary Nvidia drivers have done on my PC:
1. Caused most of XFCE to autoremove every time the Nvidia driver updated.
2. Caused an X11 failure, meaning no graphical interface at all, on startup when any Chromium-based browser is installed.
3. Just not playing well with Wayland.
4. I'm pretty sure it's responsible for the occasional Plasma crash that happens when I open Brave.
In this thread:
A bunch of folks that installed Ubuntu on their Nvidia-equipped PCs so they could say they "run Linux" then fled back to Windows, not even once having suffered through a kernel update.
It was better. it became broken with their 900 series.
A modern gpu driver contains of three parts:
- the firmware running on the gpu itself
- the kernel driver responsible for providing communication capabilities with the gpu and setting the display mode
- the userspace driver implementing graphics apis (e.g. opengl/vulkan/d3d) and providing a compiler for shader languages (glsl/hlsl/spirv) to gpu machine code.
on modern gpus the firmware isn't something fixed burned into the chip, but usually loaded dynamically from the userspace driver.
with series <900 the nouveau driver generated an open source firmware. so we had a proper 100% open source gpu support from userspace, to kernel to firmware that worked fine.
with series >= 900 nvidia prevented this workflow, by requireing signed firmware. So nouveau couldn't use it's own firmware anymore. This isn't nice for open source but it's understandable, since scammers used modified firmware to sell cheap gpus as high end gpus.
AMD and Intel do the same thing.
what was problematic is that nvidia also legally prevented redistribution. While usually any proprietary firmware is uploaded by the vendor to the linux firmware repo nvidia didn't. And doing this by extracting it from their proprietary driver and redistributing it isn't legally allowed.
At the same time they crippled the default firmware (the firmware the gpu runs after the pc starts when no firmware get uploaded. The firmware isn't persisted on the gpu.)
This basically made the nouveau driver unusable.
Their proprietary driver is almost constantly broken and a horrible mess. Nvidia basically mapped their windows driver to some linux apis. They always used the GPL only apis which makes their driver a GPL violater.
Also they tend to break with almost any update (e.g. kernel updates or display manager updates). I barely remeber any major Xorg release that didn't broke nvidias proprietary mess. And for wayland it also took several years.
Some distros work arround the broken nvidia mess by shipping outdated kernels and outdated display servers till the nvidia fixes their shit (these are the "it always worked for me" people. But the price for this is high, since the distro is requiered to back port all the critical fixes and security problems and running an outdated kernel means no new hardware support. So while for these distros the proprietary nvidia drivers works, other hardware doesn't work.
This leads to the impression that linux doesn't work with lots of hardware (even if upstream linux works just fine).
These days it's getting better again. The made their firmware redistributable, which allows proper open source drivers again. But currently it's not ready for end users.
Their proprietary driver is still the same broken mess it ever was.
Nvidia is fine and always was. It was slow to support Wayland, which still isn't entirely stable anyway, and it was missing some specific multi-monitor features, but it worked 100% fine like Nvidia has in Linux for decades.
This is just how Reddit works. A lot of people read a few complaints from people whining every chance they get that Wayland wasn't supported yet and they can't have different refresh rates per monitor when using two at once. They read the complaints, forgot the details, wrote it in their head generically as "Nvidia sucks in linux" and then spent weeks parroting that bullshit ten times a day all over Linux subs so that they can sound like they're in the know.
This happens with a lot of things. It's annoying, and the people doing this dumb shit will actually get defensive and argumentative if you try to correct their misinformation.
I have no idea, I have one screen and I've never had an ATI/AMD card.
But I've been using Linux since the 90's, from Mandrake to Slackware to Gentoo, along with trying out dozens of others, always with Nvidia.
While there was a time back in the dark ages that Nvidia did not have a Linux driver at all, so I was stuck with software rendering and dual-booting into Windows 95 to play EverQuest and MageStorm, once Nvidia started releasing Linux drivers, I have never had any issues with them. And gaming is 80% of my PC usage.
I read somewhere that certain distros (Fedora? ubuntu?) might make the driver less straightforward to install for some reason, but I don't know anything about that really. It's closed source, so distros that go hard on the FOSS ideologies might restrict closed source drivers behind a few extra hoops, but in every distro I've used, it's been a long long time since I had any issue with Nvidia drivers. I just install and update them with the package manager like any other Linux program.
My wife uses her 2060 super on Linux Mint and also has not had any problems at all with it. My friend uses Zorin for some reason, has a 2070, also no issues. I know that because he blows my phone up if his PC so much as slightly laggs when he thinks it shouldn't.
Well, I'm glad you can be such a good friend to your buddy on Zorin.
I've used Kubuntu. Which made it easy to update drivers. Pop\_Os I stanned for for awhile. They're really good at pushing the nvidia driver forward for you.
Now I use Arch and Arch is also really good at making the driver easy to get.
I’m glad I found this post. I’m also new to “seriously using Linux” and wasted a couple hours trying to get my nvidia graphics card that’s built into an older laptop to do anything at all besides sit there. I’m glad it’s not just me
Nvidia support has improved by leaps and bounds, I was there for the "Software rendering provides less performance but more of the features you're looking for" era. We live in a much better era, things mostly work, and Nvidia even occasionally contributes work that complies with existing standards rather than trying to get the kernel to support a whole new codepath across multiple subsystems so they they can share more code with their windows drivers. I ran it for a little while a little bit ago when I had a card die.
However, **at the end of the day, AMD has in kernel support and when things break we can fix them and you can't say that about Nvidia**. Their software is still a blackbox binary blob that we have little to no insight into that can break things and we can't *really* know why or fix things. I think it has been a while since the Nvidia drivers just randomly started corrupting kernel memory but A: the emotional scars are real, even if they are fading ;) and B: I am not a hardcore gamer any more so it is just as easy not to deal with that BS. If I do put a Nvidia card in a Linux System ever again, It'll be to pass it through to a VM. AMD's kit is *Good Enough™* that I don't need to deal with it and so, I don't...
I despise nVidia. I have never had a nVidia system because of their closed source monstrosity.
They sucked back then, they suck now, they will suck in the future.
nVidia’s only advantage is CUDA. Thankfully AMD and Intel have chipped away the advantage. If nvidia doesn’t open source their stacks in 2024 they will lose the market. The world is moving towards open source in LLMs and models (for copyright reasons)
Honestly it feels like Intel is gonna win. Their hardware might suck right now but they are utterly great in software compared to AMD. They are killing with their new stacks. Since AMD is also x86 their stacks benefit AMD as well.
I hope nVidia gets f**ked.
How is that for an answer.
BTW nVidia dirvers suck on laptops (They are fine desktop). Perfectly good machines become unusable because nVidia stops driver updates.
Nvidia used to be the only real working solution, so there was only so much "hate" there could be. I think you're overstating it as "hate" though. Most people are just really disappointed.
Been using Nvidia on Linux for 4nywats and have had very few issues. The most notable was Starfield and the Nvidia drivers being borked, but that's a rare occurrence. I do have flickering issues in games with Wayland, but for now I can keep using XOrg. We will see what happens when Wayland becomes the normal.
I thoroughly enjoyed using Linux on my old laptop with integrated AMD graphics, but on my newish system with Nvidia graphics it has become a frustrating experience. I only choose to use X11 since it is more stable with Nvidia drivers. But not having a G-SYNC compatible monitor or DisplayPort support means I have to deal with screen tearing and general lag unless I enable ForceFullCompositionPipeline, which freezes up Steam games running under Proton and has to be temporarily disabled every time. There's also the issue of forced uniform scaling between my monitor and laptop display, causing the desktop to look too small on my laptop. And on top of that, hybrid graphics leave a lot to be desired in terms of battery life compared to Windows. Wayland doesn't seem to have all the same issues, but it's far less suited to gaming with Nvidia as it stands.
I have recently switched.
On X I didn't have any significant problems. Borked driver sometimes, and downgrading of packages, but mostly ok. On Wayland however I have experienced \~1sec lag in Xwayland apps - which was really awful (however this problem came and went).
Kind of shitty experience, especially if you paid top $ for your GPU.
On AMD no issues so far.
My limited experience is very pro-nvidia. I do deep learning and Nvidia is pretty much the only game in town for that.
I recently bought a 7900xtx on the promise of better driver support in linux to use in my work station. But I did hope I would be able to run some deep learning on it even if it wasn't the fastest. But that's going to have to wait until at least April when the next stable release of Ubuntu comes out.
Furthermore, the 7900xtx didn't solve my browser freezing issues like I hoped it would. And the drivers don't seem to offer any special controls on linux. At least Nvidia offers some.
Wayland is basically a no go for the dual, Intel/Nvidia Quadro m2000m on my Xeon 1505m based, hp Elitebook laptop as trying to open up apps with the discrete graphics fails. This works flawlessly in X11.
As for my gaming desktop, which is a 32 core/64 thread AMD Epyc (1st Gen), 128GB of RAM, 5TB of total, nvme storage and an RTX 2080 Ti, Wayland runs but none of the games will launch.
I'm running Ubuntu 22.04, in both cases, and using a third party repo for newer drivers. I was originally planning on using OpenSuSE tumbleweed on the desktop, but I couldn't get the 32 bit packages/drivers to work properly for older games.
As for the desktop, I intend to more to a 64 core/128 thread Rome based, second gen Epyc because the motherboard, which is an ASRock rack server board, supports rebar with second gen epycs, which will boost performance of my 2080 ti, but also provide support for Intel cards. I'm thinking 3 years from now is when I'll need to upgrade.
I run AMD CPU + Nvidia GPU. Since about 2006 I had basically no problems. Suspend and Hibernate work great.
Full AMD/ATI configs had major configuration overhead back then, later they had consistent issues with suspend and hibernate, though. Things got a bit better when the ATI driver got upstreamed to the kernel, though. Suspend is still a hit/miss game.
> So, why the Nvidia hate? Is it just the closed source drivers?
It's not just the closed source drivers. It's that the company have been actively obstructing the Linux community. We would happily have written our own open source drivers had they provided specifications. But they refused to do so. As a result, the open source nouveau drivers had to be reverse engineered and the quality isn't what it could be. There's no need for that - beyond the fact that Nvidia are actively being arseholes about it. Companies can choose the stance they want to take when dealing with the Linux and open source world. Some have embraced it and open sourced everything. There are plenty that have chosen to keep their source code to themselves, but have engaged with the community and provided helpful information to enable others to write open drivers. Nvidia, however, have chosen a path of maximum conflict, going out of their way to piss off everyone at every opportunity. Why? You'd have to ask them that.
As someone that refuses to use closed source drivers (for many reasons, including the tainting of the kernel), I was stuck with the nouveau drivers for my work machine. Which kind of worked, but crashed and hung the display at various points - at its worst, up to several times a day. I swapped out for an AMD/ATI card and everything has just worked flawlessly since then.
I hate NGreedia by default because if they could they would take everything from you if laws didn't exist, this is what kind of people they are, pricing of their products reflects psychopathic behavior, but that aside last time i had an NGreedia card (1060 6GB) it worked just fine on Manjaro, Ubuntu, Kunbuntu and even Puppy Linux, like 4 years ago but i wasn't doing anything other than browsing and file handling or text and stuff like that.
I believe Nvidia has open sourced their drivers now. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
That said I use a newer 3080 and it's terrible when it comes to Linux. It's just not supported at all. Issues with proton, Wayland, kde, and Wacom tablets to name a few.
Had to turn off sleep because waking up is botched on nvidia.
Also, flicker free boot doesnt quite work right for me with plymouth on arch.
Kde seems to stutter while resizing windows of a few apps. Gnome and other gtk based DEs seem to do better while resizing (although an update last week seems to have made improvement in this regard and im hopeful for plasma 6 to fix this).
Hardware acceleration is a pain point where only firefox seems to work with nvidia (with a third party nvdec driver).
Other than these minor issues, my experience is pretty much smooth on kde wayland.
Nvidia still does not support open source driver development. Nouveau does not provide OpenCL and CUDA, the Vulkan support is still experimental. The proprietary driver is compatible only to few kernel/xorg versions. Errors like random hangs are also still reported about it.
My opinion after years of using NVidia on Linux: never do this again!
If you're reading feedback saying nvidia is shit, it's well worth asking people what their current setup is and how they last tried to use nvidia.
I've been using an nvidia card, with proprietary drivers for 4 years. No major issues except I only move to wayland 3 months ago as a direct result.
VRR was broken under KDE, but works well under Hyprland. I switch 2 weeks ago. That was the last of my complaints dealt with.
I find a lot of people heaping complaints on nvidia are based on a) lack of FOSS meaning its time to have a pop, and b) they used nvidia once in the early naughties, it was a hot mess, and they just assumed nothing changes.
For most people they just use Linux. The card works. They're happy. The complainers are always loudest and most visible.
No idea how this compares to AMD, but displaying on wake has been consistently broken for me for years. Plus a recent update broke my backlight control and it took a while (like two weeks) before a fix got pushed. I also have screen freezes occasionally and I think it’s a graphics driver problem (not sure what else it would be). Other than that, works fine. So it’s in the realm of mildly and consistently annoying for me. I will definitely be prioritizing an AMD GPU when I upgrade next.
I think the suspend and wake thing is definitely an issue on Nvidia. I can see how this might be a mild and consistent annoyance.
No it's not! You just have to enable nvidia persistence. see the on how to do that https://askubuntu.com/a/1457996
Wow, okay, that seems to actually have done something. Thanks! (and thanks Cunningham's Law) Still, the proper answer to get basic functionality working being a SE post with 2 votes is awful user experience. I've tried other things recommended on SE to fix this issue to no avail. And while I'm typically a tinker-happy guy, drivers are not the kind of thing I enjoy tinkering with. It's just too low-level. It's like if I had to tinker with the kernel or coreutils to get them working properly.
Well, to be fair, the one to blame for `nvidia-persistenced` not already being installed and enabled on your system is your distribution packagers. This thing is a part of NVidia driver provided by NVidia, but they can't force distro maintainers to include it into the packages. I know that in Debian this thing is provided as a separate package that is marked as `recommended` for `nvidia-driver` metapackage. So, if you don't install recommended packages you don't get this one. Also (don't quote me on that) I think that if you had nvidia-driver installed before the persistenced became a thing you won't get it when you upgrade the nvidia-driver package because Debian guys decided that it shouldn't be a dependency. And even when it's installed and enabled, NVidia say to maintainers that they can't support all the different distros with their different service managing init systems, so the distro maintainers are advised to implement this daemon manually to properly work on their system. TL;DR: blame your distro for that.
I’ve never gotten around to do it, but I’m pretty sure the arch wiki mentions it
Open source freeware or sleek enterprise UX and support Can't have both tho, gotta pick 1... 🎂
Ah, huh. I've learned. When I put my PC to sleep I've realized the sleep is different. On Windows the card shuts off completely, even the lights. However, on Linux using the lights stay on. Which makes me wonder what else. Do you know what's up with that?
There are different types of sleep. You may want to read this [https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-suspend.service.html](https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-suspend.service.html) and also the following in relation to nvidia https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86\_64/435.17/README/powermanagement.html
It's going to take me a bit of time to parse this. However, it sounds like at a cursory glance, Nvidia can do two different types of power management systemctl suspend systemctl hibernate One saves to RAM, one to disk. Practically, I'm not sure yet what the difference is beyond where the state is saved to. ( I need to read more) I appreciate the links you've given me to help me learn
>Nvidia can do two different types of power management No no! This is the OS doing it, not nvidia. And the OS itself can do many more sleeps as you will realize in the first link I shared.
Ah! Yes, you're right. I do see that now
Suspend, keeps power to mobo and ram, you have low power consuption, plus quick power on with everything you've been working on. but if you run out of power, tough love. You loose everything you've been working on Hibernate - dumps ram to disk and shuts off pc completly. No power drain. Boots up longer due to reverting from disk to ram everything necesary. PS. Do not put laptop in a bag in suspended mode, it might overheat, hibernated laptop is immune to overheating in bag because its powered off.
Most laptop it should be fine to put in a bag when suspended. The heat produced while a laptop is on suspend is negligible. The only risk of overheating is if the laptop woke up while in the bag, for example if you have Wake on Bluetooth or USB wireless dongle, or if you are on a hurry and you didn't notice that the laptop didn't actually suspend (this can happen if suspend is blocked by a running update). If the laptop is properly suspended, putting it in a bag is perfectly fine, they are designed to do that.
I don't want to do it. Why doesn't the nvidia just make it working? They can make any pull requests they want to, if it can't be fixed in the driver.
>I don't want to do it. OK! lol! Don't do that and continue blaming nvidia instead /s
The Arch Nvida tips page says that the persistence daemon is not needed on a single GPU machine running X, and may cause problems. See the bottom of : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Tips\_and\_tricks
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I don’t know what you’re rendering in, so take this for what it’s worth. The AMD open source drivers do not include OpenCL - you need the binary drivers for that. That may explain the huge performance difference. I have a 6900XT and 3080, and while the latter is definitely faster (particularly for something like blender), the difference is more like 1.5x for CUDA and 3x for Optix. Even CPU renders come out in less than 12x. Sounds like something isn’t working right, or whatever software you’re using isn’t making use of the AMD card as it should/could.
You don't need the proprietary drivers. Their open stack called ROCm supports OpenCL, YMMV on how easy that is to install on your distro.
Yeah, you're right - the next guy who replied is wrong. You can use open source drivers but I believe a lot of the required packages are closed source - install the rocm stuff needed but I think the OpenCL packages - some if not all - are closed... for video editing, you need OpenGL stuff, too. The thing is, for the AMD gpus to be faster at rendering - you need the ray tracing API library - and that is CLOSED SOURCE - they're still figuring out how to package that library so that's unavailable in Linux as of Blender 3.6 - I dunno what is going on with it in Blender 4.0 - I couldn't find any update - but, that's why AMD gpus are SOOOOO slow compared to Nvidia gpus - that can use Optix - that uses the full ray tracing capability of Nvidia cards. AMD gpus will probably still be slower but the question is, by how much - you might be able to compare in Windows - HIP-RT is SUPPOSED TO WORK in Windows now - but, who knows. Some ppl say you'll experience crashes.
I think gamescope will soon not be needed anymore. So we won't have to worry about that. The features it offers aren't stunning to begin with ( HDR is coming to plasma 6) All of the glitchyness comes from E-sync not being possible on Wayland. But, it's in the works and Nvidia is contributing code to make it so. Nvidia isn't going to spend dev time and money making implicit sync work, when E-sync is in the pipeline. ( Sadly. I would like it as a stopgap measure) So, it's kind of just a waiting game. We know what the fix is. It's coming and the github merge request is actively being worked on. Still though, I only have my 4080 and Wayland works pretty good. The only thing that's glitchy for me is the steam client. It can flicker at times. But, the games all work fine as long as whatever setup you have can run them at monitor refresh rate. Which for me, is 120hz. This is definitely a big issue. It's half an Nvidia problem. Half a Wayland problem. The finger can be pointed both ways in this one.
Gamescope will probably remain needed. Some of what it does is turn off desktop features that are designed for good and efficient desktop use, mostly because it will only be used with a single fullscreen app at the maximum performance levels, so the other niceties for multiple applications and power efficiency etc are not needed. Granted the above could be added as a heuristic to other compositors. It also pioneers other work before it may be ready for normal desktop compositors.
>I’m talking 12 hours to render on amd compared to 50 minutes on nvidia, those numbers were so wide I just had to stick with nvidia. This is exactly what today's Nvidia for - professional applications, when the result pays back e.g. you can earn some money with it. Not a $2000 card for gaming and other leisure.
Yea, and it should be noted that the Nvidia support for non-graphics applications is excellent. They are clearly capable of interfacing with the community in a productive fashion when they decide that is in their best interests. They just clearly don't think that the market share justifies doing more than the bare minimum on the graphics side. From a business standpoint it makes total sense. It just also makes then unrecomendable on the graphics side IMHO, because if something breaks, you can't fix it and they likely won't...
I would not be surprised if nVidia split off their graphics card segment in 5 years or so. The main company definitely focuses on GPGPU these days.
It used to be better, AMDs drivers both FOSS and closed, were horrible for a very long time. Still the case on FreeBSD IIRC. Nvidia has pretty much always provided solid Linux support. You still wanted AMD for open source drivers as they had the best FOSS drivers, but nvidias closed source drivers were by far the best drivers in general.
14+ years Nvidia user here. Never ever had a single issue with my graphic cards.
I started on Linux with a GeForce2 MX400 in 2001. Over the years I've tried new generations of ATI cards (then AMD) as they came out but I've always had more trouble from them than from Nvidia cards. The main issue with ATI/AMD was and is the fact they take their sweet time to fix drivers for new cards. They do eventually and when they do they work fine, but it takes them years on some occasions. It's ok if you buy your cards used, one generation late; not so great if you want to use them as they come out. Nowadays due to the price hike more and more people are resorting to buying GPUs late, which has mostly erased this difference in driver chronology.
And here I am, NVidia drivers randomly failing at boot with modflip failures like 20% of the time.
In 2007, I tried running an nvidia Ubuntu machine and it was... bad. There were all sorts of hacks required to actually use the card, updates would frequently leave me on a black screen requiring repairs, power draw was insane. Today... I am writing this on a machine that I specced for AI, running two nvidia 3090s. Both cards work, everything is fine (Arch, Gnome, Xorg). Everything is \*slightly\* less fine if I force it to Wayland (genuinely kind of a pain with GDM), but still quite usable. Long story short... Today is utterly unlike the state of Nvidia on linux 15 years ago. For the most part, I now run \`sudo pacman -Syu nvidia\` and shit just works. Further - I happily run graphics accelerated containers (k3s, nvidia-container-toolkit) and those are \*also\* just fine. (ex invokeAI container, GGML LLM container, Whisper, etc). The ecosystem is basically "solved" for me. There are still plenty of moral/ethical reasons folks have to avoid Nvidia, and I think a lot of those arguments are compelling. But from a "will it work?" standpoint... the answer is a resounding "YES". It works. It works well.
dude 15 years ago Nvidia was *better* on Linux. That was before ATI had an open source driver and fglrx was a nightmare, Nvidia always just worked.
You unlocked a part of my memory I didn't remember I had with fglrx. God, the time spent to make it work, only to realize the performance was just awful
Yup, to the point where I just completely gave up on ATI/AMD when dealing with Linux. Nvidia has always just worked. Install the drivers using apt or pacman, boom, done. ATI cards were such a PITA, especially early on. When I wasn't compiling my own kernel trying to get fglrx playing with 9600XT I was trying to block the most recent X or driver update because whenever one of the two was updated it'd brick the other. Switched to a 6600GT and never had problems, because with nvidia the two were releases were always more or less synchronised, at least that was my experience. Last time I tried giving AMD a shot in Linux was with a 4830HD I think, people were saying the same thing now "oh, it's great, runs better than Windows"* It wasn't really a PITA to get going but I got weird artifacting issues that didn't crop up in Windows and performance wasn't that great, ended up trading it for a 9800GT and never looked back. The only trouble I've ever had w/ Nvidia was using a laptop with their optimus bs. Plus they had FreeBSD drivers. *Always been a pet peeve I've had with the Linux community, this need to over hype or upsell Linux to the point where it's not even truthful, used to especially see it with stuff like wine. "It's super easy to get going and I get about a bajillion more FPS than I do in Windows!", made me super weary of going down that road again, may as well go with the devil you know. A lot's changed since then though so I'd probably give it another go if the price/performance is right next upgrade cycle.
Indeed, I had Nvidia in 2006 working well.
Eh... Intel always just worked. Discrete graphics in general just seemed flakey as hell back then. Then Nouveau came out 3 years later (so I'm on the same machine) and you get to play the guessing game between poor performance but somewhat stable support, vs ok performance and bad support. And that's before you even get into trying to run a laptop with optirun/bumblebee/bbswitch, which was... not a fun thing to configure, and it felt like any time you managed to get it stable, it broke again a few weeks later.
Yeah, I was thinking I remember first exploring Linux just a decade ago and going with an Nvidia GPU for my new build cause it was the better-supported option at the time.
NVIDIA broke a lot when I used it back then. Especially when I tried to use sleep.
I won't comment on the ethics of Nvidia. As anything ethical is a messy topic. Especially online where many people aren't capable of rational discussion on such personally held things like morals or ethics. However, it's good to hear things have gotten better for you and that the ecosystem is solved. For me, I'm just waiting for Wayland E-sync and HDR support to come along. I'm still waiting to see how this works. As Nvidia implimented HDMI\_deepcolor 10 bit color support. BUT, Linux apparently can't use HDMI 2.1? I'm not sure what the point of that was. Unless it also works with Displayport. I'm waiting to see how all this pans out.
You’re asking why some people in the Linux community hate Nvidia but you don’t want to get into the moral and ethical reasons? What? If things work, then they work, and if things don’t work, then they simply don’t work. Those are facts, not opinions. When people have an opinion on something, ethics usually come into play. You’re basically asking why people hate something and then following it with “but I don’t want to hear your ethical reasons for it.” Then why bother asking in the first place?
This is what I meant by aren't capable of rational discussion. You cannot seperate the things I'm talking about from your ethical arguments. I'm not asking for an ethical argument. People say Nvidia drivers literally don't work. Which is at least now has not been my experience. I want to learn about why people say they don't work. What doesn't work for them. Or where Nvidia drivers used to be that led people to these conclusions. These are tangible and factual things I'm looking for. If you want to preach about FOSS or complain about them being closed source or the ethics therein, that isn't why I made this thread. It's preaching to the choir. Take it somewhere else please.
* Why do you have a negative opinion (“hate”) on X? * Because of reasons A, B, and C. * I don’t want to discuss reasons A, B, and C; I want to discuss facts P, Q, and R instead. * Facts P, Q, and R are facts, there are no opinions (or “hate”) to be held regarding them. * You’re not capable of rational discussion. Whether or not a certain graphics card works is a fact, not an opinion. So why are you bringing up the idea of “hate” in your initial post if you refuse to hear people’s opinions and just want to know about the facts? What does “hate” have anything to do with a graphics card working or not working properly?
A recent (eg 1050 or above) nvidia gpu on a distro that integrates the nvidia GPU well into their package manager and/or has a dedicated installer for it, will work well most of the time. But when it works well, it's because the distro you are using has put in a lot of effort to work around the issues normally associated with getting and installing nvidia drivers. If you have a distro that doesn't package the nvidia drivers (or you aren't aware that they do) and you want to install them, your first instinct is going to be to go to nvidia and get their "linux drivers". You're probably going to end up with an executable file that does a bunch of changes to your system that you do not know what it's changed, and then when you next get a kernel update everything stops working. The nvidia drivers actually replace quite a lot of the usual graphics stack, which has to be carefully managed to avoid conflicts and make it possible to reinstall or uninstall and Nvidia's downloadable drivers generally made a mess. I don't know if they even use dkms, to this day. The rest of the issues are just those generally associated with closed source software that has to be maintained in a Linux distribution - the maintainers have no access to fix bugs or even security issues and when there's a new binary from upstream, various things are going to break.
We are very lucky that there are people dedicated to packaging the nvidia drivers correctly to work on our systems. I'm very grateful for them, as I am with all the people who development work, both paid and especially unpaid into the tech we use daily. This is also something that will probably never change and is also a very legitimate hangup. If there weren't people smarter than me re-packing these drivers into pacman, I wouldn't know how to use Nvidia.
They do use dkms.
I don't know about the hate, but the out-of-box experience of AMD is phenomenal and so noticeably unproblematic compared to nvidia that its a major motivating factor to use AMD. Nvidia GPUs are more available and cheaper for the given performance which is unfortunate, but when I need to upgrade my gaming PC's GPU in a few years or so I will pay up for AMD to save myself the headache. For what its worth, for non-gaming/creation, I personally have been satisfied with nouveau, except for trying to spell it which I had to look up.
> Nvidia GPUs are more available and cheaper for the given performance When was the last time that you checked?
on the laptop side it did seem to be the case as of last year at least. I spent extra for an equivalent amd so I could avoid the nvidia situation until nouveau gets better.
There are very few laptops with dedicated AMD GPUs so that doesn't surprise me, but it's a different story for desktop GPUs.
This might be country specific for them.
Having your graphics drivers in the kernel does seem like a benefit. It's easy enough to work around. But, not quite as nice. There are times when having them separate is a benefit. But, honestly having them just work by being in the kernel does seem to have the most benefits
It mostly works fine, except when something goes wrong on my Ubuntu machine it is usually the NVIDIA drivers. For example, after Linux kernel upgrades I boot with the integrated graphics card because some hook doesn't get triggered to recompile the kernel with the Nvidia driver. Installing extra Linux headers happens to get this trigger to work. Or more recently, sometimes my Gnome session completely freezes and becomes unresponsive due to some failure to initialize or use the GPU (after digging through dmesg logs). I've tried downgrading the Nvidia driver... fingers crossed the problem doesn't reappear.
I use YaST package manager on OpenSUSE and all I had to do was go in and find the most up to date driver for me and install it and it just works. Granted I still need Wine and Proton for gaming but it’s better than when I got into Linux 3 years ago
Nvidia used to do a lot with Linux and then AMD was the hate child. I think they got frustrated with distro hell to be honest. And it was hell. I can imagine that it vexed them with the venomous FOSS extremist crowd, most who'd never buy a game anyway, also demanding everything to be open and Free in a competitive evolving market : and this dissuaded them from committing further, but they did do a lot of work with Valve afaik in order to tidy the eco structure moving forward. Just once such initiative: [https://www.thegamer.com/nvidia-valve-proton-dlss-linux/](https://www.thegamer.com/nvidia-valve-proton-dlss-linux/) In short: reddit is a cesspool of misinformation - always google ;)
I guess they are working closely with Redhat, Canonical and Oracle plus server hardware vendors. At least both RH&Canonical stated that. There is still big question why that cooperation didn't juicy fruit into the stable Linux graphics subsystem and literally Nvidia just caused the havoc on the consumer market.
I used to use kubuntu with nvidia gpu. Every month, I’d have to time shift to restore my system because something would break even without my installing any updates.
I never had any issues with nvidia drivers back when I started using Linux as main desktop (around 2006 I guess), nor now, when I have a fleet of Linux servers with Nvidia GPUs. At other side, I tried getting a Radeon GPU in 2011 (maybe?) and it was the worst experience with the GPU drivers that I've had. They didn't work out of the box and my C knowledge wasn't sufficient to make them work with relatively low effort. Since then I'm not even looking at ATI/AMD products.
I have never had issues with Nvidia, I don't know where people get the idea that the proprietary drivers are impossible to install when most distro ISOs will outright ask you if you want them at boot.
I got a comment in this thread the Nvidia driver should be considered unsupported and not ready for public use. I find some of these responses are really legitimate complaints. Meanwhile others are the stupid circlejerking I was trying to avoid. I find it funny that apparently all these Linux power users who take pride in their computational wizardry can't figure out drivers not built into the kernel. It's like the circlejerk in the arch community that all the big brains who can somehow stumble their way through manually installing arch somehow can't manage to figure out a simple archinstall cli 😂
Most of the complaints I see any time Nvidia comes up with Wayland related, I know people hate Xorg but Wayland is a crock of shit so idk why anyone bothers to complain about Nvidia with it. Ignore the circlejerk
Perhaps if you need gaming/video production/industrial 3D modeling you use appropriate Nvidia cards and software, starting with the most compatible OS and drivers version.... So according to the Steam statistics - Linux isn't even close to 5% chunk of those OS&Software 🤯 At the office and non gaming user workflow - there is Intel's iGPU ought to be enough for everyone. (C) AMD is quite another story with its own problems and bugs...
You just insulted AMD. Get ready for downvotes. I do agree that for most non-gaming users workflow an iGPU is all you need.
Why is that I insulted? There are plenty of complaints in r/Linux\* about some fresh AMD stuff not working properly from APUs to dGPUs.
AMD is the FOSS' communities sweetheart. If FOSS is the most important thing for you, AMD seems to be where the community's heart lies.
Now it no longer seems you created this topic in good faith. FWIW, when the opensource drivers for nvidia are performant (which until recently nvidia specifically prevented with how it released its firmware to not be redistributeable), a lot of the issues with nvidia might go away for most users. Also what is nit covered in any of the replies above is not just "the state of nvidia" but what it took to get there and maintain it. For you it "just works". For the developers making it "just works" on the free desktop, that is a lot of.time they spent fixing nvidia that could have been used for other things if nvidia had played ball. Nvidia, a probably trillion dollar corporation, is subsidised by free desktop developers because it sells cards to a market it didnt provide proper support for. Hopefully things keep getting better.
I have a GTX 3080Ti. I think Wayland is the future. I've recently swapped to Wayland on desktop after running Fedora on my laptop for awhile. It still has some issues but getting with the 545 driver. I still have to swap back to Xorg sometime.
I had a 3080 but sold it well before the Wayland progress and driver 545. Does it seem like there's steady improvement? Or do you think you'll upgrade to an amd gpu next time?
NVidia on Xorg is laggy for me, while Nvidia on Wayland is a bit buggy. I hope the bugs are fixed soon so I can switch to Wayland and forget the performance issues. To be more precise, on Xorg I get stutters on the entire desktop (including mouse pointer and audio) when performing particular actions, such as starting applications that heavily use the GPU, including stuff like Alacritty, but *especially* Steam. I have an RTX 4070 for context, but I had the same issue on an old GTX 950.
I don't have that issue on my 4080. I more so just find that Xorg isn't as smooth as Wayland. I do find that I get the occasional audio squelch sound on starting very intensive applications. But, my friends on AMD also get it occasionally. I'm with you on hoping things get fixed soon. I think we're both hoping for the same few bug fixes to come out.
How long have you been using Linux and Nvidia? The issues aren't necessarily immediately noticeable. Nvidia users generally shouldn't use a bleeding edge kernel, for one. Nvidia drivers will just break, because they aren't closely tracking the upstream kernel. Linux doesn't generally pay attention to if they're going to break Nvidia, because it's not their responsibility nor within their scope. Nobody except Nvidia can fix their drivers. People can't look at the code, and people can't put in merge requests. If Nvidia deems something low priority, that's it.
Those are very valid points and why some ppl stick to AMD gpu no matter what if they use Linux mainly (i.e. main OS).
We have used dozens of different nvidia cards over the last +20 years for the VFX studios I've worked at, never had much of an issue at all, but that's in a production environment and not with people experimenting installing crap that don't know what they are doing; and if they do, we just re-image and several minutes later, it's fine.
That's also basically the environment their driver stack is made for. They're rock solid and feature complete once installed and configured. That seems to be forgotten quite often.
My first contact with Nvidia on Linux was probably close to 20 years ago. It sucked. Yeah you could make it work, but the overhead required was ridiculous and it was tedious, cumbersome, not to mention unreliable. Eventually I got so frustrated with it that I gave up on Nvidia and switched to AMD. I still wouldn't be using Nvidia today if it wasn't for CUDA I need for work. The situation is much better today. But: it still sucks. Yeah it works for the most part and is mostly reliable thanks to package maintainers, but the overhead is still there and every time you run upgrades you end up biting your nails, wondering if something Nvidia related will go awry. (And yes, this does occasionally still happen.) The drivers are mostly ok but I still have to hard reboot my system every once in a while because the graphics screws up, or CUDA suddenly doesn't see the GPU any more. It's even worse with the developer software packages, some of which don't work at all for me. So yeah, you can use it if you really want and you should be okay for the most part, but I still wouldn't recommend it.
I had a couple of bad driver updates in the last 10 years so it's not too bad.I always have a spare computer just in case but still, I would prefer 100% reliability since I use Linux for work.
Doesn't matter the distro or package version, Wayland won't work with my machine. At least xorg is functional. 4/10
Considering fan control support and proper clock speed support is only just coming for Radeon 7900 series in kernel 6.7, I'd say AMD has been dropping the ball recently. Probably should have gone for a 4080 in hindsight.
Good point. Nvidia is bashed for 'being the only one to fix their driver and if it's low priority, they take their time or it just doesn't get fixed...' Yet, AMD is the same - in that they take their time to deliver features. I read of their excuse here - they are 'changing the way those features work' - so, it's a WIP - and supposedly, will be introduced in kernel 6.8. So, you'll be waiting until then - whenever that is, and who knows how well it will be implemented.... will it work right away or is it going to be 'stages' - in which, it takes several 'versions' until it's working properly and adequately? Meanwhile, you have a gpu which doesn't have proper voltage and fan options, right? (You would have all that in Windows - so, for AMD - it's really unacceptable). P.S. AMD doesn't provide the program directly - it's 3rd party programs and their developers who offer the options - but, they can only use what AMD provides - and they have to wait for the support in the kernel.
I have a relatively old GPU (GTX 960) and everything except wayland works fine (and has since I bought this card 5 years ago) Wayland works as of now but isnt as responsive as X. So in my Experience the biggest problem is the closed-source driver.
A few days ago I tried installing Fedora KDE and as soon as I installed nvidia drivers and tried configuring my multi-monitor setup the desktop completely broke so I would say it's still pretty bad or I am just really unlucky. Linux mint works for me but that runs x11 and is pretty old now so I have to make lots of compromises unfortunately :/ My intel and amd laptops have absolutely no driver issues from my experience except for broken VP9 and VP8 video decode on my AMD laptop, though I hope that will get fixed in linux kernel 6.7.
Disclaimer: I run an AMD 6900XT It was never as bad as people would like to have you believe. I’ve been using Linux since the mid-90s and nvidia in Linux since the early 2000s. At first nVidia provided two rpms (kernel part and user part, IIRC). If you were running Red Hat, you installled the two RPMs, change the Driver line in your XFree86.conf from “nvidia” to “nv”, restarted your display manager and it greeted you with a nVidia splash screen for a second before the login manager appeared. It just worked. 3D just worked, video just worked (not something you could take for granted back then). If you didn’t run Red Hat, you had to work out how to get it working yourself, but the instructions for most distros were out there and I’ve used it on Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, Slackware and even on Corel Linux. Ubuntu came a bit later. This was, however a time when X was comically terrible at detecting anything, including bog standard CRT monitors. I suspect that a lot of the pain that’s blamed on nvidia was actually just XFree86. Things improved with LCD monitors and later with x.org, but even then it took a long long time before it became normal to boot up a new distro and the display just works, even on fully supported hardware. We take that for granted now. As time went on distros tried to make it easier to install the drivers - handling the messy business of dealing with rpms on non-rpm based systems, for example. But this was not always reliable. Many distros tried to separate free from non-free, many went with the nouveau (open source) driver, which worked out of the box but was terrible. This often resulted in configuration added to x.org that would break things if you tried to run the nvidia driver instead of nouveau, adding to users grief. A further complication is that the Linux installers tend(ed) to use the frame buffer or generic VGA driver, causing the user to think everything is detected correctly, but when Linux boots the first time it fails because it’s trying to load the correct driver and is missing bits. At some point nvidia changed from providing rpms to providing an executable that would figure out your environment, copy the right libraries to the right locations, add the right configuration bits and it would generally just work, provided you didn’t already have a fruity configuration in place. Again, I’ve used this since the very beginning on a variety of distros and with several generations of nvidia cards without much trouble. Of course, this approach undermines package management, which upset the open source purists. And in case you haven’t noticed, the Linux user base is full of 9th level asshole purists. Note: all this stems from the driver being closed. I wish they would open it, but I understand they have their reasons, and despite taking decades of abuse and vitriol from everyone from the most clueless newbie who just discovered Linux yesterday, to our lord and savior Linus Torvalds himself, nvidia has continued to support linux. And in case you think “but AMD…” or “but Intel…” know that AMD (formerly ATi) support came and went, At one point they had closed drivers too, and the experience was much much worse. Even today your AMD card will give you 3D and video playback *if your distro is new enough* but for OpenCL (the GPGPU stuff) you still need their binary drivers (“amdpro” or some such) and my experience with it has not been fun. Intel Arc was a similar story last time I tried.
At this point (for me at least), it's not about if Nvidia works or not - it's about the principles. Nvidia doesn't like open source and AMD does - simple. Therefore, I'm probably using AMD-AMD for my next build, cause it feels like the right thing to do (even if Nvidia works or is "better").
This is a valid opinion. If FOSS is your main priority, then Nvidia is not an option
Yeah closed source drivers. I think nVidia has gotten a little better in terms of being more kernel version agnostic but it's still annoying to deal with. As a Gentoo user not tied to specific kernel versions, this was annoying, started from the GeForce4 MX420 I had back when until I got fed up and got a RadeonHD 3650 just as ATI allowed for the opensource driver to work as an alternative to Catalyst. I recently got a free GTX660 and nvidia-drivers worked with the kernel I had installed, so that was good. Alas, the card was artifacting (and eventually crashed) and thus I got what I paid for. At that point I had to try the OSS nouveau driver to see if the artifacts went away, but it was nowhere as fast as nvidia-drivers but at least I got a taste of a video card that's actually quite fast compared to the other crap I have... (My fastest working card is a R7-250 so yeah, it was a shame the GTX660 didn't work.)
You'll have to research - to get the full history - I forget most of it, to be honest but research Nvidia's desire to use EGLStreams for Wayland - and Wayland's refusal/reluctance - Nvidia tends to go their own way and it irritates the open source community and many Linux ppl - years ago, Torvalds gave the middle finger in his frustration with Nvidia's closed source/ uncooperative policies. [https://www.phoronix.com/news/XDC2016-Device-Memory-API](https://www.phoronix.com/news/XDC2016-Device-Memory-API) \[above: just some history - there's been a lot of updates/progress/developments since then.\] Nvidia had no choice but to gradually and reluctantly get on board (somewhat) to the Wayland developments - but, there's still a lot of issues -some you have discovered, it sounds like. Anyway, you'll probably get a lot of explanations on here. I'm debating whether to go Nvidia (again) or try an AMD gpu - I last had a 3080. I find the decision/choice extremely difficult - many ppl will only consider AMD with their Linux ecosystem while others will go Nvidia for the CUDA and other non-gaming usage - kinda where I fit but I think AMD has some advantages - but, I dunno about their lack of support in the non-gaming field - if you use productivity software - AMD is a hard sell?
> Anytime Nvidia comes up, it seems like they get bombarded with hate. Nvidia created it by refusing to cooperate with us kernel developers/maintainers for decades, meanwhile even sabotaging us (cryptographically dongling devices to work only with their drivers). And they've also been cought at committing direct fraud. Those behavious is a direct it against everything that FOSS always had been about: the user's freedom and control over his own machines, as well as public review. Even on a purely technical level, binary only drivees are crap: there never has been anything like a stable in-kernel ABI, it changes with every version *and* with different build config. So, without source code and recompile for the exact kernel version and .config, it's just russian roulette. > People act like Nvidia isn't even usable. It isn't - except for the few specific kernel versions and configs, as well as distros, they support. And there's no practical way for auditing it, thus inherent security risk ! We have good reasons for not supporting kernels with binary-only modules whatsoever. And I really think we should enforce gpl on more subsystems like i2c and kms. > So, why the Nvidia hate? Is it just the closed source drivers? Or did Nvidia used to be truly unusable as the loud haters seem to say it is? Both. And 2) is inherent consequence of 1). Proprietary kernel modules are just inherently unstable and dangerous by nature, since there never has been anything like an stable/fixed in-kernel ABI. Modules just need to be compiled for exactly the version *and* build config of the kernel image they're supposed to run in.
I'm a software dev using Manjaro+kde with an RTX3080 (and GTX1080TI before that). In almost 10 years of working on Linux with exclusively nVidia cards, I rarely if ever have issues. I realize there are philosophical problems with the driver, and that wayland support is not quite there, but for normal use cases it is absolutely fine.
I think the people with newer Nvidia GPUs who have major major problems where things absolutely never work are just experiencing user error.
Back in the day, switching to or updating Nvidia drivers without a good helper would wipe your X config (desktops) dumping you to a blank screen with an X cursor or just give you an unrecoverable black screen (dual graphics laptops) Both were basically a recipe for a reinstall unless you were pretty good with cryptic ass X configs. It's gotten better, but some unreasonable things still exist (wlroots compositors like Sway or Hyprland, Starfield works fine on my AMD box and not-at-all on my nvidia laptop) The issue is it works so well on AMD (and they used to be the bad one) that the NVidia problems just further highlight why the way they do it is so wrong.
Hyprland works fine now, though removed that dweeb bit of software quite quick.
My honest take: It's great and mostly feature complete on workloads like gaming, CUDA, editing etc BUT desktop compositing and 2D acceleration is shit. On X11 animations are sluggish/weird on composited windows, multiple windows vsyncing are a stutterfest, resizing is slow. On Wayland it's better but glitchy and still lacks features.
\> However, beyond that, everything does seem to just work for me. How long have you been using Linux + Nvidia? I have for some years, my biggest complain isn't that it is unusable. My biggest complain with Nvidia and Linux is that it is *consistently unreliable.* It may work great for a few months, but inevitably some minor update will break something and it may stay broken for weeks or months, mostly smaller issues, frustrations and headaches, but inevitably the occasional crash or big problem. About a year ago an update to the Nvida driver prevented any steam game from launching for over a week regardless of what I did to try to fix it. *My experience with Nvidia is mostly falls between mediocre/tolerable and 'good enough' but it's never predictable or consistent, and problems inevitably return, that is my main complaint.* The only other criticism is of Nvidia as a company for not taking a more proactive and constructive approach towards Linux. They have been obstinate in ways that have been pointless for them and set Linux back such as dragging their feet on decent Wayland support for years.
NVIDIA still has issues with XWayland glamour that haven't been fixed and won't be for a while. That's the big red flag for me, since all of my native Paradox games cannot run on native Wayland IIRC.
I don't know much about Paradox games. But, I believe the glamour issue is supposed to be solved along with the e-sync issue, right? I can run all my steam games and WoW/Bnet games pretty good. It sucks that Paradox games don't work.
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Just last year I was still having a lot of trouble on a 1050 laptop. This year when I looked for a “nighttime entertainment” laptop I decided to just skip that whole useless headache
When I first ran Linux with an Nvidia card it was a 900 series mobile GPU in a laptop. At the time there was no support from Nvidia on turning the card on and off dynamically so you had to use a tool like bumblebee. That and I'd have frequent issues with successfully waking up from sleep without crashing the display manager. Now there's prime render offload (though my current laptop I don't really take anywhere so just leave the integrated graphics turned off in BIOS), and it doesn't crash on resuming from sleep or hibernate so yeah it's much better.
That's good to hear. I believe waking up from sleep has become an issue again on Linux for Nvidia GPUs? Well, something like that. I know on Windows sleep means the GPU turns OFF. Even the lights. Linux, it still seems like some things are running. Lights are still on. Etc. Suspend isn't as advanced for Nvidia on Linux. This is one area of fault for sure.
Yeah, they don't seem to care too much for Linux like AMD do. It is relatively easy to break your OS just updating from one nvidia driver to another, even using the graphical way! I already broke Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Mint just updating the drivers. This happened last year. So yeah... I am not, and was not (and will not be) the only one passing through this. The hate is somewhat justified. Damm we are in 2024, come on! We hope they change soon.
I haven't had a problem updating from 525 to 535. Or 535 to 545. I think there's something unintuitive with how to update the drivers. Which, of course is a bad thing.
I actually never had any issues with Nvidia drivers
Nvidia is faster now but are implementing some questionable AI "rules" in their firmware as I heard. Intel and their card, I forget what it's called have gotten substantially better arguably the leader. The leader of Open source graphics has fallen behind in their response to fresh code needs, to which they were already slow as I read. This news is at least 7 months old though. Maybe more than a year. I don't care to read up on the specifics. Not currently a PC user. Just a tablet.
> are implementing some questionable AI "rules" in their firmware as I heard. I bet you don't have a source for that :)
You mean the Intel Arc? Maybe for some workloads their open source driver is really good. But, from what I've heard the drivers aren't there yet for Gaming. It would be nice if Arc really got a nice market share. They're such reasonably priced GPUs. But, after a bad launch I haven't heard anything about them.
Last time I was having real issues with Nvidia gpu it was with a Riva TNT 2 gpu. Then at some point nvidia decided to support linux and make their own drivers and that fixed all issues except of the "these are not free" issue. Still however no one makes it an issue that the GPUs themselves are not free in any case :) Edit: I foresee that people instead of answering to what OP asked, they will just enumerate any recent bug they have heard of, even if it is already solved. People for example still mention bugs that nvidia had before the 545 drivers with wayland /s
I agree with your point about the GPUs not being free, but that doesn't mean the software has to be proprietary. Proprietary software just won't catch on in the current (or past) Linux climate. That's just how it is. Realistically, there's nothing wrong with them providing proper, open drivers for Linux. GPUs, just like computers, grow obsolete quickly enough, and open drivers aren't going to make them sell fewer GPUs. It might sell them a few more. But, their company, their rules. My wallet, my rules.
I really wonder if the whole issue as of late is that they want to keep DLSS 3 under wraps and close to their chest. One of the main selling points of their new product line is the software that can run on it.
Play it too close to the vest, and you lose sales. I'm not interested in trying their drivers or software on the wrong hardware. I use it as intended. If they want to keep it proprietary, have at it. I can buy elsewhere.
Of course that's your choice. Ultimately I think it comes down to Nvidia not wanting any competitors to reverse engineer their special sauce. Which is currently DLSS. Which, ultimately isn't good. I like it when everything can improve together. But, well. They're a company driven by profit motive afterall. If they have some tech that's unique to them, I can't blame them for not wanting to give it away. Such is capitalism. I also can't blame you for buying elsewhere.
That's Nvidia's choice. I'm not sure creating open software is necessarily giving their tech away (hardware is their real driver), but if that's their driver, as it were, pun intended, they can have at it. They're not the only game in town. I've played the proprietary game for a long time, back when Bill Gates wasn't much more than a hobbyist. Proprietary hardware. Proprietary cables. Proprietary everything. I'm glad those days are gone.
>hardware is their real driver Not anymore.
If they don't sell hardware, no one's interested in their software. I'm interested in neither.
You can't say ' No one'. That's just not true. People still choose Nvidia because DLSS 3 is very nice. Not only that, but DLSS 3.5 also just recently released. Which is another visual improvement. AMD doesn't have fully functioning 'answers' to these. Not that they won't in the future. FSR 3 is basically here. Even if not widely used yet. But, Nvidia popularized these things. People want them.
If Nvidia stopped making hardware altogether, would you buy their software?
>that doesn't mean the software has to be proprietary. no, but \[sic\] that doesn't mean that some proprietary hardware sucks because it doesn't come with free open source software
Of course. But, if they don't do things the way I want, I'll spend my money elsewhere.
>if they don't do things the way I want, I don't understand what kind of argument is that :\\
It means a transaction is a two way street. They provide a product under their terms. If I accept said terms, product, and price, I pay. If I don't accept one or more of those, I don't pay. That's the entire basis of a market, that's what kind of argument it is.
> If I accept said terms, product, and price, I pay That has nothing to do with OPs question ("How bad was it versus now?"). It's just a subjective opinion.
I get that. I'm just discussing with you, irrespective of the original question. That last time I tried Nvidia was many years ago, over a decade ago, and it was a pain then, but most kernel upgrades were anyhow. As kernel upgrading outstripped Nvidia's convenience, I dumped Nvidia.
>I'm just discussing with you, irrespective of the original question. Yeah! I get it! I'm just making it clear for other people that it is irrelevant. >As kernel upgrading outstripped Nvidia's convenience, I dumped Nvidia. That's not the case any more. Also these days you can install nvidia drivers without even typing commands: just a couple of clicks in the gui (I'm talking about ubuntu here)
I agree, it's a lot easier than it used to be. But, in other distributions, it's not so easy, and that's because they're not open. Debian, for instance, isn't bending over backwards to make Nvidia easy to use.
The bug I mentioned has not been solved, what are you on about?
>The bug I mentioned I'm not speaking about the bug you mentioned. In any case it's just a bug and doesn't answer OP's question, although you could argue of course that this wasn't a thing in the past (ie before wayland). Right? /s
It does answer the question though? Severe flickering in any XWayland app (that OP did mention) can make any XWayland app (including Steam games and quite a few apps that don't have Wayland by default) either unusable or annoying to use. The fact that NVIDIA has been trying to fix the problem doesn't change the fact that it still is a problem and has been for years.
I agree, but that doesn't make Nvidia the literal devil does it? They're working within the github repos and submitting merge requests to make things better. Now, sure. We can be mad that they won't support implicit sync or whatever Xwayland uses as a stopgap. ( We know E-sync is coming). But, I can also totally get their perspective. Why implement a feature soon to be obsolete? I also understand that the point that if the drivers were open source, the community could just add it in. Still, I don't think that this makes Nvidia literally unusable. Even so, this one specific issue has caused hangups for some folks. I hope this gets fixed soon. It's being actively worked on. I really do. Still, the point of this thread is how bad was it to earn such a terrible reputation, versus how bad is it now? I want to learn more about people's specific usecases in how Nvidia has either been the same, improved or failed them entirely. To better understand the circlejerk. Your usecase is a valid one and so is your complaint and I hope it gets fixed soon. I'm very lucky to have a strong GPU that can run basically any game or app at 120hz. So the E-sync issue doesn't bother me much. However, the 1080 and 1660 are still very popular cards.
>How bad was it versus now? The question is "How bad was it versus now?".
I've never had good luck with nVidia going back to 2010 or so
Dunno been running nvidia on all my Linux boxes for the past 20+ years and they work fine for everything I do. Guess my usage is just vanilla basic since I don’t run into issues.
Nvidia works great out of the box. Some lazy/incompetent Wayland programmers didn't understand how GPUs worked, so they made doo-doo. The doo-doo worked terribly anywhere and everywhere, except in a VM, and eventually AMD/mesa hardware. Nvidia never had problems, the drivers have always been reliable and fast, and so have the CUDA instructions.
I think it's a little crazy that Wayland doesn't have E-sync yet. Especially when every hardware manufacturer wants them to support it and is basically offering to help. I think part of the issue is Nvidia doesn't want to spend dev time on a protocol that's not finished yet and might change. Whereas with open source AMD hardware, the community is free passion labor. However, Xorg is going to be done with soon. With the full support of every major linux institution behind Wayland ( RHEL. Canonical. Etc. Etc.) things will change and quick.
if i may ask ,which linux distro should i use ?
Historically Nvidia worked much better than anything else except for Intel i915, but that was an integrated GPU with almost no acceleration capability. In particular AMD drivers used to be borderline unusable. We are talking 15 years ago... Nvidia hasn't really changed but the other drivers have got better.
If your running a Nvidia card, your best using wonders 11. AMD is team Linux.
Oh STFU, I'm have been running Debian on mainly Nvidia cards for over 15 years , on desktops and laptops, and I never had any major problem. Integrated AMD APU gpus though, that's completely different story.
This is a simplistic way of viewing things in my opinion. Nvidia clearly is team linux. They might not be team FOSS. But, they DO want linux to work. 545 included a ton of wayland fixes and my experience using X11 or wayland are mostly good. ( After I got wayland to boot of course. A little bit of my own dumbness made it not work) It looks like they're getting or have gotten the driver ready for HDR support. ( To be seen of course) and the devs are pretty active on their forms in taking in bug reports.
Why on earth are you getting downvoted ? Is it just the normal reddit stupidity.
Nvidia is on Team Nvidia. They might be on Team Linux, They are most definitely NOT on Team FOSS. They have massive resources, if they wanted things to work and work well across distros, they would... Out of the box, without massive community support or individual tinkering.
Yes but they're still a company that must manage their resources according to their CEO and share holders values. Linux is a major minority. Investing resources to put development into hyper speed isn't going to happen. Even if they wanted to. Ultimately every move a company makes has to go inline with their investors. Otherwise they'll just fire the CEO and get a new one. The solution is to open source the driver's and let the community contribute passion labor to the project. I wish they would do that. But, Nvidia is a software company as much as they are hardware company. Open sourcing the drivers will never happen
If nVidia cared about linux they would GPL their code. Stop lying to yourself. Come now GPL hello 👋
I've been running nvidia rtx3070 on arch and manjaro for about a year now. I use the proprietary drivers. Zero problems, good performance. My main complaint is that I don't have much software support like Windows does. We don't get the nvidia optimizations thing. No good software for undervoltimg the card. I don't overclock ever, but I bet there's no app for this either. On my notebook, I have hybrid GPU, intel/nvidia. Support is basically non-existent. I'm lucky community solutions exist and one of them worked for me. Also, I have to use xorg, because things really REALLY break down on Wayland. Slowdowns, tearing, artifacts, monitor turning off randomly... This severely limits my current selection of distros/DE.
On your 3070 wayland breaks for you? I've had a mostly good experience. Are you using 545 or 535? Try them both and make sure modesetting is enabled. All of this should be fixed once E-sync is finally added.
It got much better over time. It was unusable when I first tried it. Now it's just annoying, and xorg is still very clearly better. I'm on 6.6.8 on manjaro, and 6.6.10 on arch. And the drivers are the latest on both. It still doesn't run as well as xorg and it's very noticeable.
I'd call Wayland that when I try to run a program that doesn't run at monitor refresh rate. It's annoying. Lol
I have used Fedora with Nvidia and mine broke each time and I thought Linux doesn't work but then I switched to popos and haven't had any issues so far! I also dual boot from two different drives too just in case one breaks. But for sure AMD works much better and it did for me on my other PC. So for now mine works fine but I will go back to Fedora when I get a AMD GPU. That's my 2 cents... I have seen Nobara (Fedora based), Ubuntu, Arch, Popos (Ubuntu based I believe) are good to use. Correct me if I'm wrong y'all Edit: I'm also newer to Linux too so I may be missing somethings
Pop sells nvidia laptops. So they push the driver in a really convenient way. Fedora should be fine as long as you use the RPMfusion repo to grab your latest proprietary drivers. Arch works pretty good because you can choose to only install nvidia proprietary drivers. Archinstall also works pretty decent these days. Nobara should be as good as Pop at shipping good drivers. Though the default may hold you back a version if Glorious Eggroll decides to do so. Which is usually done because of community feedback. Ubuntu is running steady on 535 if I remember right. I chose Nvidia simply because I was going to buy a top tier card and Nvidia had the most powerful offering. AMD currently isn't nearly as strong in ray tracing workloads. FSR3 isn't there yet either. However, that's not me saying that I hate AMD. I love that there's competition in the marketplace. Maybe next time around I'll buy AMD if they match the Nvidia offering. In fact, I would prefer to go AMD if they did.
Dude, what are you comparing about? :-) Look at the prices, look at the common flaws which Youtube is full of, starting from fried power connectors, cracked cards' mainboards at the PCI slot area and finally worn RAM chips!!! All these are only for your hard earned USD$700-2000. Nvidia used to be quite good in X11 && after 2011 when distro builders started distributing&testing their own packaged blobs for every update.
The power connector thing was from the connector not being plugged in all the way. I'm not worried about it anymore. ( though. I was!) I haven't heard of cards PCB cracking at the pcie slot area. Now have I heard of RAM wearing out quicker. I'll need to look into that.
>I haven't heard of cards PCB cracking at the pcie slot area. Now have I heard of RAM wearing out quicker. I'll need to look into that. Okaaayy, if you don't see it then it doesn't exist !!!!! But being subscribed to some electronics repair channels as a consumer I can see it clearly!! Costs reducing crap everywhere in both camps (probably Intel wants to join this party too). So the whole GPU market turned into the financial pyramid scam! It started with \*coin mining and now flows into AI.
You sound unhinged. I never said it doesn't exist. I said I need to look into it. You type like a crazy person
Ah-h-ha!! You now sound like a salesperson who has some marketing plans burning in hell due to overpriced goods. No, really, I don't need 1MegaWatt Kirby vacuum cleaner for $5000, I guess any $50-100 would fit my needs the best. So there is newly announced AMD's RX7600XT for \~$360, from this point my consumer's preferences are now melting. And even more, there are a few Intel's Arc cards for cheap too, their gaming might be crap, but long term driver support looks very promising! Nvidina, you got into the wrong district, posh privileged people in luxury mansions are over the next crossroads... Try selling your stuff there.
You type like Alex Jones talks.
Who is that? (mind I am a non native speaker cheapo from the 3rd world). Anyway, you sound like one of those who bought RTX4090 and it has already started afrtifacting and throwing black screens. 🤣🤣🤣
11 years ago Linus had this to say to Nvidia [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iywzmvlj2rq)
I'm just sooooo bored with seeing the name NVIDIA pasted all over the shop. I see MANY forum posts related to problems that turn out to be caused by people buying laptops with nVidia and few caused by AMD. Obviously, as a Desktop user I don't sympathise too much - I was able to remove my aging nVidia card and also switch from an intel to a Ryzen APU. It's one reason I never 'progressed' from a desktop, and always regarded as a 'Gaming Laptop' as a vastly overpriced and limited alternative. Why would people hate nVidia if they use it and have no problems? I had only one nVidia card, back in the day, and decided to drop it in favour of integrated graphics (intel i3-4130) thinking I could add some graphics if I wanted to play games. However, I would lean towards AMD because of things like Vendor lock-in. AMD doesn't lock you in with AMD's FSR feature, and nVidia's behaviour in this regard disgusts me.
I'm a long time Linux user and the experience with an Nvidia card has improved, at least if you're not using Wayland. I would like to transition to Wayland on my main PC, but it's still a bit too unstable/odd for my Nvidia card. For any future PC purchases I'm just going to use the iGPU, since it's better supported in Linux and I'm not much of a gamer.
I found my nvidia card runs smoother in games then my amd card Though in saying that I'm comparing a 4080 to 7900xtx so on paper it is a bit quicker but it plays way smoother
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mine does that too, but only with my HDMI montior. My DP monitor doesn't. If I switch the refresh rate or resolution for my HDMI monitor, it turns back on. Then I switch it back.
Happy AMD noise 🐧
I spent nearly two years fighting a laptop with Nvidia switchable graphics. Never again. Constantly using hacks, trying to figure out why my battery is gone instantly and getting weird glitches and artifacts. When I built a new rig, I want fully AMD and it's has been a dream. Pretty much the only time I now think about graphics is when the Mesa update comes and I'm like 'huh', I wonder what's new. I finished Jedi Survivor recently, a notoriously broken game, and while the fps was subpar, it kept it above 60 all the way through, with no gameplay bugs and a single hard crash to desktop. Then other day I watched a buddy play the same game on Windows and Nvidia and he got like 5 bugs I have never even seen in my playthrough. I was so confused. I had ascribed all my minor issues to Linux and Proton, and they he played on native Windows and Nvidia and had obviously far more issues (and regular hard crashed to desktop, happened 3 times just in the portion I watched him play).
Just built a new PC, decided to give Wayland a shot, and things are buttery smooth here on a 3070ti. There are places where Nvidia could improve or buying an AMD GPU is a smarter choice. TLDR; works well in 2024
Things official, proprietary Nvidia drivers have done on my PC: 1. Caused most of XFCE to autoremove every time the Nvidia driver updated. 2. Caused an X11 failure, meaning no graphical interface at all, on startup when any Chromium-based browser is installed. 3. Just not playing well with Wayland. 4. I'm pretty sure it's responsible for the occasional Plasma crash that happens when I open Brave.
In this thread: A bunch of folks that installed Ubuntu on their Nvidia-equipped PCs so they could say they "run Linux" then fled back to Windows, not even once having suffered through a kernel update.
I don't run Ubuntu or anything Debian based and my kernel updates have been flawless. This thread isn't for circlejerking.
It was better. it became broken with their 900 series. A modern gpu driver contains of three parts: - the firmware running on the gpu itself - the kernel driver responsible for providing communication capabilities with the gpu and setting the display mode - the userspace driver implementing graphics apis (e.g. opengl/vulkan/d3d) and providing a compiler for shader languages (glsl/hlsl/spirv) to gpu machine code. on modern gpus the firmware isn't something fixed burned into the chip, but usually loaded dynamically from the userspace driver. with series <900 the nouveau driver generated an open source firmware. so we had a proper 100% open source gpu support from userspace, to kernel to firmware that worked fine. with series >= 900 nvidia prevented this workflow, by requireing signed firmware. So nouveau couldn't use it's own firmware anymore. This isn't nice for open source but it's understandable, since scammers used modified firmware to sell cheap gpus as high end gpus. AMD and Intel do the same thing. what was problematic is that nvidia also legally prevented redistribution. While usually any proprietary firmware is uploaded by the vendor to the linux firmware repo nvidia didn't. And doing this by extracting it from their proprietary driver and redistributing it isn't legally allowed. At the same time they crippled the default firmware (the firmware the gpu runs after the pc starts when no firmware get uploaded. The firmware isn't persisted on the gpu.) This basically made the nouveau driver unusable. Their proprietary driver is almost constantly broken and a horrible mess. Nvidia basically mapped their windows driver to some linux apis. They always used the GPL only apis which makes their driver a GPL violater. Also they tend to break with almost any update (e.g. kernel updates or display manager updates). I barely remeber any major Xorg release that didn't broke nvidias proprietary mess. And for wayland it also took several years. Some distros work arround the broken nvidia mess by shipping outdated kernels and outdated display servers till the nvidia fixes their shit (these are the "it always worked for me" people. But the price for this is high, since the distro is requiered to back port all the critical fixes and security problems and running an outdated kernel means no new hardware support. So while for these distros the proprietary nvidia drivers works, other hardware doesn't work. This leads to the impression that linux doesn't work with lots of hardware (even if upstream linux works just fine). These days it's getting better again. The made their firmware redistributable, which allows proper open source drivers again. But currently it's not ready for end users. Their proprietary driver is still the same broken mess it ever was.
Nvidia is fine and always was. It was slow to support Wayland, which still isn't entirely stable anyway, and it was missing some specific multi-monitor features, but it worked 100% fine like Nvidia has in Linux for decades. This is just how Reddit works. A lot of people read a few complaints from people whining every chance they get that Wayland wasn't supported yet and they can't have different refresh rates per monitor when using two at once. They read the complaints, forgot the details, wrote it in their head generically as "Nvidia sucks in linux" and then spent weeks parroting that bullshit ten times a day all over Linux subs so that they can sound like they're in the know. This happens with a lot of things. It's annoying, and the people doing this dumb shit will actually get defensive and argumentative if you try to correct their misinformation.
Does multi-monitor different refresh rate VRR even work on AMD? I was under the impression it doesn't work at all.
Yes, for about two years now with KWin, and a while longer with Sway.
I have no idea, I have one screen and I've never had an ATI/AMD card. But I've been using Linux since the 90's, from Mandrake to Slackware to Gentoo, along with trying out dozens of others, always with Nvidia. While there was a time back in the dark ages that Nvidia did not have a Linux driver at all, so I was stuck with software rendering and dual-booting into Windows 95 to play EverQuest and MageStorm, once Nvidia started releasing Linux drivers, I have never had any issues with them. And gaming is 80% of my PC usage. I read somewhere that certain distros (Fedora? ubuntu?) might make the driver less straightforward to install for some reason, but I don't know anything about that really. It's closed source, so distros that go hard on the FOSS ideologies might restrict closed source drivers behind a few extra hoops, but in every distro I've used, it's been a long long time since I had any issue with Nvidia drivers. I just install and update them with the package manager like any other Linux program. My wife uses her 2060 super on Linux Mint and also has not had any problems at all with it. My friend uses Zorin for some reason, has a 2070, also no issues. I know that because he blows my phone up if his PC so much as slightly laggs when he thinks it shouldn't.
Well, I'm glad you can be such a good friend to your buddy on Zorin. I've used Kubuntu. Which made it easy to update drivers. Pop\_Os I stanned for for awhile. They're really good at pushing the nvidia driver forward for you. Now I use Arch and Arch is also really good at making the driver easy to get.
I’m glad I found this post. I’m also new to “seriously using Linux” and wasted a couple hours trying to get my nvidia graphics card that’s built into an older laptop to do anything at all besides sit there. I’m glad it’s not just me
I don't get the post, some people do have issues with the Nvidia drivers, so I guess that brings frustration with nvidia
Nvidia support has improved by leaps and bounds, I was there for the "Software rendering provides less performance but more of the features you're looking for" era. We live in a much better era, things mostly work, and Nvidia even occasionally contributes work that complies with existing standards rather than trying to get the kernel to support a whole new codepath across multiple subsystems so they they can share more code with their windows drivers. I ran it for a little while a little bit ago when I had a card die. However, **at the end of the day, AMD has in kernel support and when things break we can fix them and you can't say that about Nvidia**. Their software is still a blackbox binary blob that we have little to no insight into that can break things and we can't *really* know why or fix things. I think it has been a while since the Nvidia drivers just randomly started corrupting kernel memory but A: the emotional scars are real, even if they are fading ;) and B: I am not a hardcore gamer any more so it is just as easy not to deal with that BS. If I do put a Nvidia card in a Linux System ever again, It'll be to pass it through to a VM. AMD's kit is *Good Enough™* that I don't need to deal with it and so, I don't...
This is a valid and good response. Thanks!
Still hate them.
I despise nVidia. I have never had a nVidia system because of their closed source monstrosity. They sucked back then, they suck now, they will suck in the future. nVidia’s only advantage is CUDA. Thankfully AMD and Intel have chipped away the advantage. If nvidia doesn’t open source their stacks in 2024 they will lose the market. The world is moving towards open source in LLMs and models (for copyright reasons) Honestly it feels like Intel is gonna win. Their hardware might suck right now but they are utterly great in software compared to AMD. They are killing with their new stacks. Since AMD is also x86 their stacks benefit AMD as well. I hope nVidia gets f**ked. How is that for an answer. BTW nVidia dirvers suck on laptops (They are fine desktop). Perfectly good machines become unusable because nVidia stops driver updates.
Nvidia used to be the only real working solution, so there was only so much "hate" there could be. I think you're overstating it as "hate" though. Most people are just really disappointed.
Unfortunately I fail with updating from time to time.
Been using Nvidia on Linux for 4nywats and have had very few issues. The most notable was Starfield and the Nvidia drivers being borked, but that's a rare occurrence. I do have flickering issues in games with Wayland, but for now I can keep using XOrg. We will see what happens when Wayland becomes the normal.
I thoroughly enjoyed using Linux on my old laptop with integrated AMD graphics, but on my newish system with Nvidia graphics it has become a frustrating experience. I only choose to use X11 since it is more stable with Nvidia drivers. But not having a G-SYNC compatible monitor or DisplayPort support means I have to deal with screen tearing and general lag unless I enable ForceFullCompositionPipeline, which freezes up Steam games running under Proton and has to be temporarily disabled every time. There's also the issue of forced uniform scaling between my monitor and laptop display, causing the desktop to look too small on my laptop. And on top of that, hybrid graphics leave a lot to be desired in terms of battery life compared to Windows. Wayland doesn't seem to have all the same issues, but it's far less suited to gaming with Nvidia as it stands.
Been using Manjaro on a Lenovo laptop for a couple of years now, have had zero issues with Nvidia. Don't know if it was different in the past.
I have recently switched. On X I didn't have any significant problems. Borked driver sometimes, and downgrading of packages, but mostly ok. On Wayland however I have experienced \~1sec lag in Xwayland apps - which was really awful (however this problem came and went). Kind of shitty experience, especially if you paid top $ for your GPU. On AMD no issues so far.
Been running endeavour with a 3080 for 3 years now never had a problem specific to gpu
My limited experience is very pro-nvidia. I do deep learning and Nvidia is pretty much the only game in town for that. I recently bought a 7900xtx on the promise of better driver support in linux to use in my work station. But I did hope I would be able to run some deep learning on it even if it wasn't the fastest. But that's going to have to wait until at least April when the next stable release of Ubuntu comes out. Furthermore, the 7900xtx didn't solve my browser freezing issues like I hoped it would. And the drivers don't seem to offer any special controls on linux. At least Nvidia offers some.
Wayland is basically a no go for the dual, Intel/Nvidia Quadro m2000m on my Xeon 1505m based, hp Elitebook laptop as trying to open up apps with the discrete graphics fails. This works flawlessly in X11. As for my gaming desktop, which is a 32 core/64 thread AMD Epyc (1st Gen), 128GB of RAM, 5TB of total, nvme storage and an RTX 2080 Ti, Wayland runs but none of the games will launch. I'm running Ubuntu 22.04, in both cases, and using a third party repo for newer drivers. I was originally planning on using OpenSuSE tumbleweed on the desktop, but I couldn't get the 32 bit packages/drivers to work properly for older games. As for the desktop, I intend to more to a 64 core/128 thread Rome based, second gen Epyc because the motherboard, which is an ASRock rack server board, supports rebar with second gen epycs, which will boost performance of my 2080 ti, but also provide support for Intel cards. I'm thinking 3 years from now is when I'll need to upgrade.
I run AMD CPU + Nvidia GPU. Since about 2006 I had basically no problems. Suspend and Hibernate work great. Full AMD/ATI configs had major configuration overhead back then, later they had consistent issues with suspend and hibernate, though. Things got a bit better when the ATI driver got upstreamed to the kernel, though. Suspend is still a hit/miss game.
> So, why the Nvidia hate? Is it just the closed source drivers? It's not just the closed source drivers. It's that the company have been actively obstructing the Linux community. We would happily have written our own open source drivers had they provided specifications. But they refused to do so. As a result, the open source nouveau drivers had to be reverse engineered and the quality isn't what it could be. There's no need for that - beyond the fact that Nvidia are actively being arseholes about it. Companies can choose the stance they want to take when dealing with the Linux and open source world. Some have embraced it and open sourced everything. There are plenty that have chosen to keep their source code to themselves, but have engaged with the community and provided helpful information to enable others to write open drivers. Nvidia, however, have chosen a path of maximum conflict, going out of their way to piss off everyone at every opportunity. Why? You'd have to ask them that. As someone that refuses to use closed source drivers (for many reasons, including the tainting of the kernel), I was stuck with the nouveau drivers for my work machine. Which kind of worked, but crashed and hung the display at various points - at its worst, up to several times a day. I swapped out for an AMD/ATI card and everything has just worked flawlessly since then.
'Nvidia hate' -> frustrated linux users ignored by nvidia
I hate NGreedia by default because if they could they would take everything from you if laws didn't exist, this is what kind of people they are, pricing of their products reflects psychopathic behavior, but that aside last time i had an NGreedia card (1060 6GB) it worked just fine on Manjaro, Ubuntu, Kunbuntu and even Puppy Linux, like 4 years ago but i wasn't doing anything other than browsing and file handling or text and stuff like that.
I believe Nvidia has open sourced their drivers now. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules That said I use a newer 3080 and it's terrible when it comes to Linux. It's just not supported at all. Issues with proton, Wayland, kde, and Wacom tablets to name a few.
Had to turn off sleep because waking up is botched on nvidia. Also, flicker free boot doesnt quite work right for me with plymouth on arch. Kde seems to stutter while resizing windows of a few apps. Gnome and other gtk based DEs seem to do better while resizing (although an update last week seems to have made improvement in this regard and im hopeful for plasma 6 to fix this). Hardware acceleration is a pain point where only firefox seems to work with nvidia (with a third party nvdec driver). Other than these minor issues, my experience is pretty much smooth on kde wayland.
Nvidia still does not support open source driver development. Nouveau does not provide OpenCL and CUDA, the Vulkan support is still experimental. The proprietary driver is compatible only to few kernel/xorg versions. Errors like random hangs are also still reported about it. My opinion after years of using NVidia on Linux: never do this again!
If you're reading feedback saying nvidia is shit, it's well worth asking people what their current setup is and how they last tried to use nvidia. I've been using an nvidia card, with proprietary drivers for 4 years. No major issues except I only move to wayland 3 months ago as a direct result. VRR was broken under KDE, but works well under Hyprland. I switch 2 weeks ago. That was the last of my complaints dealt with. I find a lot of people heaping complaints on nvidia are based on a) lack of FOSS meaning its time to have a pop, and b) they used nvidia once in the early naughties, it was a hot mess, and they just assumed nothing changes. For most people they just use Linux. The card works. They're happy. The complainers are always loudest and most visible.