I haven’t had any issues with my nvidia GPU. I did some distro-hopping and didn’t have any nvidia issues in any of the distros I tried.
If you want everything to work out of the box, I would recommend Bazzite. Pop! OS had me using the AMD image and fetching the nvidia driver manually (the nvidia image just didn’t work for me). After that, everything worked brilliantly.
I’ve learned it best to use nvidia drivers with nvidia cards and the AMD drivers with the AMD cards. I recommend this for performance.
Well, can’t say for everybody, but i have no trouble running nvidia gpu on Hyprland with nvidia-open drivers. Haven’t spotted any troubles with Plasma or MangoWC either, even though i haven’t used them for as long.
I’m super annoyed at Fedora workstation at this moment. My 240hz Samsung monitor can’t use HDMI to get to 240hz, regardless of the quality of the cable. I have dual monitors and one is already using the type c so one of my monitors have to be 120hz.
Stupid question but worth asking, has Mint caught up with the latest generation of AMD GPUs yet? I tried to install it as a first OS right after building my current PC when those cards came out and it… it did not go well.
That pretty much just comes down to the Linux kernel being used afaik.
So figure out which version of the kernel supports your GPU and compare it to the one that Mint ships with.
I run a legacy NVIDIA graphics in my ten year old laptop. GeForce 750M. The proprietary drivers are faster and have real video acceleration but haven’t been updated in forever and don’t support Wayland.
Nouveau works okay. I haven’t gotten video acceleration to work yet, even with installed firmware. Nouveau-vulkan is a bit buggy.
Well, can’t say for everybody, but i have no trouble running nvidia gpu on Hyprland with nvidia-open drivers. Haven’t spotted any troubles with Plasma or MangoWC either, even though i haven’t used them for as long.
Same experience, it has worked flawlessly for me too!
That’s the thing with AMD drivers, they’re the damn near perfect software. Doing lots of stuff yet you’d never know it’s there. It stays nicely out of the user’s way, you don’t even have to think about installing them and shit just works
Then there are the Nvidia drivers
They are not perfect, but their developers – 1 or 2 actually allocated to work on in-kernel drivers, such as Mario Limonciello – almost are.
I used em dashes to avoid a comma party, I promise I am not a LLM bot
I used em dashes to avoid a comma party, I promise I am not a LLM bot
that’s what I would say if I was an LLM bot!!
👀
I think it’s more of a
Open drivers vs proprietary drivers
Intel drivers:
I need an intel driver to turn the fucking useless onboard graphics off. for debian. any tips?
any tips?
My laptop has this option in the bios settings
Not sure if it’s only for laptops but you could check there.I checked, it’s the easiest option and isn’t on my stupid MSI motherboard
Leave it to budget boards to exclude every possible useful setting but keep “boot from lan”
when I bought this fucker for £800 in 2018, I assure you it did not feel budget.
Never had an issue with my Nvidia card. OBS can use the hardware encoder out of the box. Just a few weeks ago upgraded to a AMD card and had to set some “advanced” settings in OBS to do the same. Really happy overall, but after seeing this meme for years I expected rainbows and sunshine but was unpleasantly surprised in that regard.
my nvidia card caused sleeping and hibernation to randomly and regularly fail, and it made me very vary of system updates breaking random things.
My nvidia card prevents suspend working properly, but to be fair my previous nvidia card had the same problem when it was in a Windows machine.
I never use sleeping or hibernation, so can’t attest to that functionality.
Updates never broke random things for me with regards to the gpu. My install is 7 years old, so it’s been updated a lot.
My nvidia card causes horrendous screen tearing in VR if my monitor supports variable refresh rate. I have to unplug the gaming monitor to use VR
I don’t have VRR monitors and only occasionally dabbled in VR, to my experience without issues besides ALVR disconnecting from SteamVR sometimes. I picked up the VR set now that my system is beefed up and I still have the same issue sometimes, so I’m not chalking this up to my older Nvidia card or drivers.
When you want to do GPU processing for AI, crypto, video editing, etc, though, this gets reversed.
Getting Cuda working on Linux with an nvidia card is relatively painless. Just a few well-documented commands, worked on the first try.
I could never get AMD’s equivalent to work on Linux, though, and it led me down a horrible rabbit-hole of trying a dozen different driver versions from a dozen different places, all with their own unique and quirky ways of installing… And it still never did work.
ROCM is pretty simple. It’s just no where near as robust and supported as Cuda.
Thats just poor distro support, kind of like CUDA in the past… ROCM should “just work” if it’s shipped right. But it’s not really a priority with maintainers.
Now, if you’re trying to run CUDA stuff with ROCM, that’s a whole different story. The bast majority of GPU software has extremely poor ROCM support compared to CUDA, and some of this is definitely from AMD footgunning.
For me it was deadsimple once i tried setting it up with nix, granted you need to learn a little about nix so maybe that cancels it out a bit lol.
For me cuda was painful. I did the well documented commands, rebooted and had no output on my laptop screen anymore. Probably a complication due to Optimus, but still…
ROCM still barely works on Windows and it’s only recently been supported at all IIRC.
15 years ago this was true lol
3 years ago this was true. Not sure if nvidia works properly with wayland even now, though at least the trend is different now
It has no issues, NVIDIA just works these days (if you use a distro where you can choose to use proprietary drivers for it during installation)
I mean yeah, but that’s a little like saying “computers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.” It’s a pretty large limitation to place on the user’s choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.
It used to be that there was no option at all, on any distro. You’d have the broken proprietary drivers, or the open source reverse engineered one with half the performance and unreliability in specialty features.
Since then Nvidia has shifted focus to get their drivers working properly, and there were also changes making them more open source, tho I’m not sure that’d mean the “proprietary driver” will go full foss at some point.
If op is to be believed, the proprietsry driver is already a lot more stable, so it’s now a software licensing issue not an unfixable technical issue.
Exactly!
Well, no, not at all. Nvida works on wayland on any distro, but it just works on some distros.
It just works means no user config required.
Are there distros where you can’t do that? I mean, maybe Debian?
I have had only a few issues with nVidia on Linux for a few years. But, I am using an old card. I’d like to live in the nice sunny castle, not the scary one with bad weather. But, at least I have mostly working shelter while I play my games.
Debian has proprietary software via opt-in through the non-free repository. However the Nvidia driver is horribly outdated so I had to install them directly. But now it works decently well. But my 1070TI is on borrowed time now no matter the OS 🥲
Yeah, I have the same issue with my 1080. I haven’t installed Debian in decades because everything in “stable” is so incredibly outdated. It’s supposed to lead to a stable system, and in some ways it does. But, in other ways because everything is so out of date, people often have to install from source or find alternate packages, so it becomes possibly even more unstable.
I think with flatpak it’s fine nowadays. So I have the stable base Debian, but most applications are flatpak and for dev work I use containers or nix anyways.
I think there are some that only install FOSS during initial installation
Like which ones?
OpenSuse, I think
From what I saw from my old room mate, it worked fine as of about 6 months ago. They got lower performance than on Windows, but still ran most games over 155fps (their monitor’s refresh rate) without any notable bugs. They had one of the cards that was like $2k new a year or two ago, idr the number, I think 4090?
i’d argue it was the opposite back then. i have PTSD from fglrx
Eh. I had issues with Nvidia drivers like 5 years ago. Still, a lot more stable today
You might not remember ATI atrocity.
The fps gap in games is still quite high with nvidia compared to windows, amd is almost on par now
I’m running wayland with nvidia-open and nvidia-utils packages, and have never encountered any driver issues in both graphics and compute.
The only time I’ve ever really had issues with Nvidia drivers is when installing the meta package for CUDA (because it tends to include a previous version of the driver, which causes install/uninstall havok), or with laptops and hybrid graphics.
But the laptop issue is almost completely gone with newer distros like Bazzite.
because it tends to include a previous version of the driver, which causes install/uninstall havok
To be fair, this is a packaging/distro problem, as CUDA should always work (and be kept in sync with) the newest graphics driver.
ROCM and OpenVINO (AMD and Intel) are even more of a pain, actually.
You mean all three apps that support waylamd are working? Wow. At the same time?
Keep living in the past old man.
i wish i could go to an amd card but i just upgraded my video card (geforce rtx 4060 ti) like 3 months before i decided to move to linux :(
Jo, no problem! Just use the proprietary drivers and vulcan, cuda etc. Just works
Especially with a recent card, like a 4060. Problematic are only the cards which are considered legacy by nvidia (I think older than the GTX 900 series), because they do not update their drivers for newer kernels. In these cases resorting to nouveau (in-kernel driver for nvidia cards) is your best bet, but you will not use the card’s full potential.
Edit: One can of course use proprietary drivers with legacy cards if you use a distro in a legacy kernel. But having old kernel then comes with less compatibility to other devices, as backports generally take their time.
yeah its not too bad i have the regular drivers and nvidia-smi shows the card using the gpu for most things; and jellyfin works great too.
i wish ff7 rebirth worked better but i think thats more of the game than a card.
What distro do you use, generally, there is a relatively easy way to switch to the nvidia proprietary ones, or what is “regular”in your case?
Last time I switched nvidia drivers after initial installation, I had to uninstall (lib32-)vulkan-nouveau (32bit and 64bit) and install (lib32-)nvidia-utils manually, but I guess, that may distro specific.
i’m on mint
➜ 11:11 katy ~ apt list --installed | grep "nvidia" libnvidia-cfg1-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-common-580/noble-updates,noble-updates,noble-security,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 all [installed,automatic] libnvidia-compute-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-compute-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 i386 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-decode-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-decode-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 i386 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-egl-wayland1/noble-updates,now 1:1.1.13-1ubuntu0.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-egl-wayland1/noble-updates,now 1:1.1.13-1ubuntu0.1 i386 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-encode-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-encode-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 i386 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-extra-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-fbc1-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-fbc1-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 i386 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-gl-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-gl-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 i386 [installed,automatic] nvidia-compute-utils-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-dkms-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-driver-550/noble-updates,noble-security,now 550.163.01-0ubuntu0.24.04.2 amd64 [installed] nvidia-driver-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-firmware-550-550.144.03/noble-updates,noble-security,now 550.144.03-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed] nvidia-firmware-550-550.163.01/noble-updates,now 550.163.01-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed] nvidia-firmware-580-580.126.09/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-kernel-common-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-kernel-source-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-prime-applet/zena,zena,now 1.4.8 all [installed] nvidia-prime/noble,noble,now 0.8.17.2 all [installed,automatic] nvidia-settings/noble,now 510.47.03-0ubuntu4 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-utils-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic]I see 😇 you are already using latest proprietary nvidia drivers, if I read that correctly and you have nvidia-utils, which enables you to use Vulkan
Anyway, on mint, one uses the GUI tool driver-manager to switch (nvidia)drivers:
hm actually i thought i was right but they are recommending me the proprietary one
Hu? Your APT tells, that you have the 580 installed but GUI tells you have nouveau installed? 😮
Btw. The (open) means that nvidia has made parts of the driver open source
Wait, does Nvidia actually update their drivers according to the latest Linux kernels?
😁yess
I feel ya. I built pure AMD explicitly for linux gaming early last year… and then proceeded to not install linux for like 6 months 😅 had a 2080 ti for years before that
I did the same (different card but similar situation) and I was able to sell my Nvidia card for similar to what I paid for it. Not sure if that would be the case these days though.
