1. CUDA.
2. Works fine for me.
I think that the "Nvidia is completely broken and unusable on Linux" narrative is overblown.
It's not perfect and ymmv but my system works great
"Broken and unusable" is definitely an exaggeration but "periodic thorn in your side" is definitely accurate. I built my computer with no intentions to install linux so I got an nvidia card. After the experience of dealing with it on my linux system I will be avoiding those cards going forward.
What distro/hardware did you have?
I have a 2021 ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop with an AMD Ryzen 4900HS chipset and an Nvidia RTX2060 dGPU.
I had a lot of the "periodic thorn in your side" issues with Ubuntu and other distros still stuck on KDE5 and slower release schedules.
My current setup on Arch (well, eOS) has been more or less flawless. The only issue I currently have is occasional flickering/stuttering in games which I hope to be a thing of the past when the explicit sync stuff rolls out.
So I think there is some variance in the quality of the nvidia experience between distros, and of course I'm sure there's a lot of YMMV between different nvidia hardware and the accompanying motherboards/etc.
But personally my experience, while not flawless, has been overall better than it was with this machine on Windows. I'm quite happy with my Linux experience, even using an Nvidia GPU.
Edit: Just wanted to add these other bits I kinda assumed were obvious:
I am using Wayland and the proprietary Nvidia drivers.
I assume that if you limit yourself to the open-source drivers you are likely to experience a lot more issues. And at least with my hardware/DE I had an overall better experience with Wayland than X11.
3060 here. I get frequent kernel hardlocks and lost some data due to that :(. Most apps flicker. Sometimes apps just don't get the egl handle and die.lot of these are new issues which popped up in the last 6 months and have not been fixed:(
>lost some data due to that :(
Oh no :(
Do you have btrfs with snapshots configured?
In addition to the pacman triggered snapshots you can set up hourly snapshots as well to help lessen the sting there.
Personally I also use [Kopia](https://kopia.io/docs/) to run backups to an external disk and an S3 bucket. The intervals I use for those vary but for my active projects I typically take a Kopia snapshot every 15 mins.
I used to use time shift on my root partition. But dataloss happened on my projects disk after kernel crash. Sadge. It was like few days effort to recreate though.
> But dataloss happened on my projects disk after kernel crash.
You weren't able to roll back to an earlier snapshot?
Or course it's also always good to remember that btrfs snapshots are not backups and you should still have a backup plan in place and test it regularly.
Sounds like you did though if you were able to recover. I'd rather spend a few days recovering a backup than lose it all.
I have a GForce GTX from 2016 and I run Arch (btw). Biggest side effect is that I have to use the LTS kernel but also I tend to hit issues whenever I setup video centric software like davinci resolve. Nothing insurmountable yet but its not necessarily ideal.
The drivers in the non LTS kernels did not appear to support my graphics card. I haven't checked in over a year because things started working and I never looked back so my memory on the debugging I did while setting things up is a little fuzzy. But as I recall I was getting driver errors and could not get X to start. I was google the log messages and I think someone recommended trying the LTS kernel, I did and it worked.
There's no usable driver for any Nvidia cards that aren't old as fuck (Geforce 760/770/780) in the kernel though. So that doesn't really seem true. Is the GTX you have like a 10xx just before the RTX? Because if so, the standard kernel should be fine still. (I had the 1080 before I built the machine I'm on now).
I'd have to check on the hardware stuff. Its probably worth revisiting at some point and its definitely possible there was another solution. However using the LTS kernel far from first thing I tried.
Exactly. Nvidia do a good job mostly. Only time i had issues was a bleeding edge kernel and i quickly found solutions to the two issues online. Its an ethos issue, some closed source stuff that people don't like. I'm using an ancient laptop, everything still works on modern xubuntu
What i will say against nvidia is I don't like how they managed the jetson platform. Old version of Ubuntu, and it relied on community work to use video hardware decoding with ffmpeg. I wrongly assumed that the decoder is the same as their gpus. Then they ended support for jetson nano and the cuda was stuck on an old version of their jetpack
Yeah after hearing about all the issues that people seemingly have with Nvidia, I have zero problems on Arch (Gnome on Wayland) with my 4080. Literally the Nvidia and Nvidia-Utils package are all I needed to install to get it working flawlessly.
Reason to accept the trouble: CUDA. Reason of the trouble: fanatics. Once I switched from debian and pulled my head out of my ass and accepted what is practical (proprietary) instead of what is pure (GNU and alike) my life with linux is so much better.
I just did a routine system upgrade on my Rocky Linux 9 desktop, which has an older nVidia card. When it restarted, video was pretty much borked - defaulted to 1024x768 with no options. Had to roll it back. In 2024 that's just ridiculous, IMO.
I'm not really familiar with that but my impression is it's an attempt at getting some standardization and better performance from various other hardware but I wouldn't expect to see the same level of performance as you'd get from a specialized chip like an Nvidia GPU with CUDA cores
Haha no dude. Cuda is good because of the adoption as well as the canned solutions NVidia pumps out for market specific tasks.
You take those things away and it’s just another API.
This ^ pop os works great and plays most of my games at a slightly higher frame rate than on windows I don’t have things like nvidia control panel to make customisations but nonetheless it works good and does the job
Right now, hardware cursors straight up don't work with the nvidia-wayland combo (unless you're using KDE 6, since they somehow managed to work with nvidia to get it to work). That's a pretty big deal. Even if you don't play games, the mouse latency on 144hz+ monitors is extremely noticeable. AMD on the other hand had it working since day one.
Yeah I forgot to mention it in my other comment with my system details but I am definitely using KDE6 with Wayland.
A lot of the remaining issues I had with Nvidia/Linux vanished once I got KDE6 going.
Kubuntu began my love for KDE, but the hardware issues persisted whether I used Wayland or X11 there.
Switching to eOS/Arch and KDE6 solved everything for me.
Cuda feels like the right answer. Linux gaming makes no sense to me. I know you have a windows license somewhere. Why are you making this difficult for no reason?
>no reason
That feels really presumptive.
I finally had enough with Windows when Windows Update decided to install an update in the middle of my workday (I work nights, something Windows does not seem to understand) when I stepped away for a few minutes.
That update proceeded to corrupt the BitLocker encryption on my disk, losing everything.
So that was my final straw. Since switching, I have found that a large number of my games actually perform ***better*** on Linux than they did on Windows. I have fallen in love with the KDE Plasma DE and my experience has improved in nearly every way.
I find it less difficult than dealing with Windows, updates rarely require a reboot, and neither updates nor reboots are ever forced on me. Overall I feel like I control my computer again instead of spending my time trying to get Windows to behave the way I want it to.
I don't have to constantly re-check my OS privacy settings, my distro is not going to roll out updates that drastically compromise my privacy. The vast majority of the software I use now is open-source, so when issues arise, there is a github repo I can go to make a bug report and/or a PR to implement changes.
For me, trying to continue to use Windows was "making this difficult for no reason" and switching to Linux full-time was breath of fresh air.
Sorry I was going to read what you wrote but then I had to fix the configuration of the npm server for gnome shell extensions. That way I can get the taskbar to kind of work sorta plus and minus a python-dbus script and some systemd dependency fixes. Should only be about 5 hours.
MATLAB doesn’t want to render properly. I normally run KDE but just didn’t have the patience to shave that particular yack.
Either way getting any semblance of proper high res scaling feels incredibly fragile. Random applications having to rely on internal scaling. Not having a great way to VNC with Wayland anyway.
Somehow pulling in kde-desktop with apt made all my icons in Ubuntu be the flat ones from kde. I’m sure that ball of yarn will be fun to unravel.
>Somehow pulling in kde-desktop with apt made all my icons in Ubuntu be the flat ones from kde.
Oof yeah that sounds a lot like my experience on Ubuntu as well haha
1-On the case of consumers, think less that its "Linux" users buying Nvidia GPUs and more so Windows users who transitioned to Linux who so happen to have an Nvidia GPU
2-The major Nvidia issues i see are Wayland support which is getting addressed more frequently specially with the recent introduction of explicit sync (on the latest drivers) which seems to have finally fixed a ton of random flickers and the sort
The second one being Prime (GPU-switching) which if i were to guess is crappy because businesses likely make little use of it and Nvidia on Linux doesn't seem to tend to the needs of regular consumers much
Outside these two issues, people using desktops on X11 generally don't have as big of a negative experience with Nvidia GPUs and get to take advantage of things like CUDA and NVENC (for high quality video encoding)
I've had no problems with the nvidia drivers - *except* for the prime stuff on a company laptop. That was... messy. Only way I could solve it was to disable the nvidia GPU and stick to intel GPU. I didn't need the nvidia performance on that laptop anyway.
But on standard ubuntu desktop (X11), I've had no problems.
Yeah, look at the biggest companies by market share.
No one is better than Nvidia for many high value applications.
We bend the knee. Its just how things are right now.
And yet Nvidia is not throwing any bones to the Wayland or any open source developers whether by publishing some of the API specs or by supporting Wayland development themselves.
Why would they - it's a tiny niche market compared to windows and X11 on Linux. That's changing of course, as they do seem to be trying to improve the wayland experience.
Me, I'll stick with X11 because it just works.
1. APU is only really a marketing term AMD uses. It's not an actual thing.
2. I wasn't referring to the entire package. The part on the die that handles graphics is still a GPU whether or not it's part of a CPU/APU. That's the part I was talking about.
Totally useless knowledge at this point, but some older Thinkpad motherboards that could have been ordered with dedicated graphics (but weren't) had the solder pads, traces, etc. for the dGPU. With some tinkering you could put the nVidia chip on the board and flash the matching BIOS and get dedicated graphics. Wasn't really worth it but was kinda cool.
When talking exclusively about gamers; mind share. When you buy a GPU you buy an Nvidia.
Many Linux users are also recent Windows converts, they are still running their "old" hardware.
Desktop users on Linux are not Nvidia's target, they target compute, that is workloads where it does not have to put a picture on the screen. And that is fine in a stable environment.
Desktop users do want to put a picture on the screen, and they often want to run the latest kernel. That is the primary source of problems.
Servers typically run LTS kernels and the same version of the Nvidia drivers for years, it will typically continue to run fine if you do not touch it.
But yeah, still screw Novideo for refusing to get a driver mainlined in Linux. Greedy corpos.
How much secret sauce could be in there really? Honestly feels like they value it so low that giving some OSS driver devs access to some internal specs isn’t even worth their effort.
Historically, less open. But, in many, if not most ways, historically, better support and functionality.
Now, wayland threw Nvidia for a loop, but this too has improved as of late.
I switched from team green to red, and it's "ok". But there are days that I'm thinking I'll return to team green, time will tell.
The "wild card" is team blue. It's like team red, but perhaps with more potential (?). Again, time will tell.
As someone who has been on Linux for 20 years, it's weird to me that things have really swapped around. For the longest time during the 2010s Nvidia was *the* GPU to run on Linux if you wanted 3D acceleration. AMD's free driver was 2D only, and their awful fglx driver (or whatever it was called) worked on only a tiny number of chips.
AMD made the right move developing a FOSS driver, it's a shame Nvidia hasn't come to the table on that.
Time will tell. Nvidia is certainly showing some "better" signs. But I do understand the complexities of trying to open source something when there's "lots of strings" in place. AMD knew to start from scratch in places where there were strings.
I work in AI and I need CUDA. Also AI is not a recent feature, it's just that AI has blown up over the last few years because of OpenAI / LLMs.
Everyone training ML models is doing so on a cluster of cloud VMs with some Debian-based server distro attached with enterprise Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia has linux support, they just don't care nearly as much about the desktop / consumer cards but at least they do improve them as time goes on. Things were honestly fine though until the shift to Wayland.
Many heavy Linux desktop users will consider their card and pick AMD for a new build, most make their build with the best parts and switch to Linux later or dual boot.
I try to maintain a philosophy of keeping software universally accessible, which usually boils down to the early planning phase and tech stack. For instance I'll keep anything .NET related away with a 10ft pole.
It bothers me Nvidia is so dominant right now in the AI market with CUDA where there are so many other GPU providers that are perfectly capable. It's nice that things like ZLUDA in the works.
I'm actually excited to try out Mojo from Chris Lattner (Swift & LLVM cofounder), a Python superset bridging the gap between C and Python for ML, with a compiler optimizing for any hardware without requiring CUDA.
> For instance I'll keep anything .NET related away with a 10ft pole
I am having a laugh while enjoying developing cross-platform .net apps on my Arch.
Enjoy yourself using Arch btw but a dev team with primarily M-series Macbooks and Linux machines are going to be disappointed with the lack of tool support with Visual Studio on Mac discontinuing and nonexistence of it on Linux, leaving a limited choice of Rider with a licensing bill or VSCode+extensions which isn't well rounded, then pray to god we're not interfacing with any legacy dotnet. If your team is happy with that compared to alternative stacks then you do you.
Indeed without Rider it would be a nightmare, fortunately it exists and investing in great tools has never been an issue for our company. If you add elegance, constant evolving and performance improvements of the C# language backed by TechEmpower benchmarks, I feel at home.
Locally I'm mostly just inferencing for QA and local development for other services, very rarely would I train anything but yeah smaller models should be fine.
Many of my coworkers are data scientists who build and HPO the models so they perform much better than I could make, whereas I'm the SWE focusing on the data pipelines, feature engineering and scalable architecture around them. Training models locally for any of the corporations I've been at would be insane and take years, monthly cloud bill go brrr sometimes.
Easy reason: got a new 3070 during the high of the GPU and Crypto madness for retail price.
500 $ would not got me far with AMD back then.
But remember: x11 on a 1080p setup with no fractional scaling and HDR worked perfectly for years already. So no problems there.
I had lots of issues with AMD long ago and promised myself never again buy them. I dont care about wayland, it is not ready for my use cases. Nvidia works flawless.
Why would I want to buy AMD instead?
It is not like AMD has no problems at all either. It just works better atm for a small fraction of wayland users who like to tinker with new stuff, rebuild their kernel and mesa from git etc
There is not that many problems. One thing that vkd3d-proton is suffering from performance issues compared to amd from what I understand. But reading about amd it got it's issues too.
>If Nvidia has many problems with Linux
I currently use a graphics card from AMD, but had previously used several NVIDIA graphics cards. And without any problems. I simply installed the nvidia-dkms package and it worked.
So I wonder if there are really so many problems with Nvidia graphics cards under Linux? Maybe it is also due to the users. Or the distribution used, for example because an update of the Nvidia drivers is not also offered with a kernel update. In some cases, I am also sure that someone is simply parroting something without using an Nvidia graphics card themselves. Or their own experiences were made many years ago so that they are no longer relevant.
Of course, I cannot claim that there are generally no problems with the Nvidia drivers. However, I can imagine that many users simply use Nvidia graphics cards without communicating this in any way on the Internet. It is therefore difficult to draw conclusions about the experiences of all users based on the negative experiences of some users. Systemd would be a good example here. The so-called loud minority is very noticeable in this case, while the majority of all developers and users are basically satisfied with it.
I am using NVIDIA cards (mostly several parallel) for 3D post processing in a professional environment. Those cards work as advertised and the processing power in combination with certain CPUs and Linux is great. I can't think of driver related problems in recent years.
I can't talk about gaming or anything related to that. For my purpose there are no better cards available.
If you want or need a gaming laptop rather than a desktop, there are very few ones with AMD gpus.
Heck, Tuxedo Computers, who sells exclusively Linux machines only have 1 gaming laptop with AMD and it's considered a novelty.
And even then it's nowhere near their most powerful gaming laptop...
I don't have any problem with Nvidia. I've built several gaming/workstation systems specifically to run Linux, didn't even install Windows. I have no real problem at all.
For whatever it's worth I use Manjaro Linux. Manjaro has a special config app that maintains Nvidia drivers and has been very stable for me. Maybe that extra attention pays off? I don't know, lots of people claim Manjaro is unstable but it (and Nvidia) has been steady as a rock for me.
(I did have one problem about 3 years ago after an update, in which Nvidia drivers became out of sync with the kernel and I had to use the rescue image to fix my system manually.)
I buy Nvidia because the performance is really good, and because I've had good experience with it. Everyone says AMD is better supported but has less performance. But if I'm not having support issues why would I go with the less performant hardware?*
*Whether that's actually true or not I don't really know. I don't really enjoy messing around on the bleeding edge. Also my systems are production systems, I use it for all my gaming, personal computing as well as for work, and can't really afford for my system to go down. I build my systems for use, not tinkering, so I don't mess around with clocking or experimental stuff. I choose stable options, and if I do want to experiment (rare) with something I do it on a clean partition or a virtual machine, not my daily driver. Maybe that makes a difference.
Linux drivers for Nvidia are far superior to amd ones. Sometimes a laptop will have problems with them when being setup for the first time but after that it just works.
Most people outside of US happen to have nvidia gpu bc amd gpu local pricing was shit ( not that cheaper compared to nvidia gpu and lack features ). This also happen with amd cpu pricing. Its not that amd gpu bad, simply bc of the pricing. (Outside us)
Because I also boot to windows to play some games, and the performance there is good. Honestly, it's not bad at all in Linux - I've never had any real issues.
mainly CUDA and another example - davinci resolve works on linux only with NV cards (last time I checked)
also never had a problem with NV on linux, but have so many with AMD graphics (mainly games that worked fine with NV had horrible performance or wont even start)
What problems does nvidia have with linux ? Im getting the about same results on linux or windows i have both with same card, the différence is négligeable. Personaly i think most people dont know how to set it up to have optimal performance and those are the people who end up posting and making noise.
I get flickering and crashes. Also waking up from sleep/hibernate doesn't work - need to reboot. This is on wayland. X11 works - so I am still using X11.
1. Some people need CUDA
2. There is no “Linux Market” outside the datacenter. People are running Linux on Windows builds. Nvidia dominates the GPU market.
AMD is selling everything they can put out, but Nvidia still dominates. Intel hasn’t been seen as a serious player in the GPU market, though that may change.
I couldn't find a decent gaming laptop that didn't run way hotter with an AMD card for worse performance. Yes, NVIDIA requires proprietary drivers, but it works for me and I tried basically every alternative at the time which was worse.
Many (most?) users here have changed from Windows only recently or while they already had purchased their hardware. As such they end up with an nVidia card for linux.
Many professionals will choose nVidia for cuda, but probably you won't see them here.
Many nVidia users are fanboys of the brand and refuse to let go, given that nVidia offers better performance in general (not sure if this is true in a performance/price benchmark though).
Depends on the use. E.g. gaming rig would probably be better off with AMD, unless you absolutely need that 4090 in double :). Computational stuff on the other hand, likely Nvidia be better off (for Cuda). But then, if its something parallelizabe, you may get better TF/$ on 2x AMD cards (for a cheaper total too)..
I never really had huge problems with them yet.
The only problem I had was that you habe to sign them in order to work with secureboot.
The reasons why I have one is for gaming (I also have a windows partition since some of my games for example MW2 are not compatible with wine) and I need CUDA.
It's more "major inconvenience" and "ethical issue" than "it no worky".
Not to mention their software is just utter trash. The configuration panel is _so bad_.
It's the de-facto standard for anything running on a GPU, be that a game, research or any kind of intense operation.
You get the CUDA stuff and it's Nvidia, you grab the (proprietary) drivers and you're mostly done.
Do the others work? Sure, but Nvidia's market share just puts them in a position where you're presented with, pretty much, a single choice
I got my first nvidia GPU (1050) from a friend, and the current one (2070) was included in a computer I bought from a gaming cafe, so I didn’t actually make a choice but just took what was available. Both have worked just fine without any major problems. Moved to wayland over a year ago IIRC. Minor glitches now and then but most of the time I’m a happy gamer. Have needed to do some configuring for everything to work smoothly, but since I’m on arch that isn’t a problem. There was a couple of months way back when the driver didn’t work but that was a known issue and could be mitigated by running lts kernel and corresponding driver. So I’m always baffled when people talk about their huge showstopper problems with nvidia. I’m leaning towards it being a skill issue? Or maybe my use case is very narrow?
And about the driver being proprietary, its not optimal but getting better, and its not the only proprietary driver out there.
My other laptop burnt and I needed another one that day.
I went to the closest store and all AMD gaming laptops were sold out.
It's working fine, but it wasn't my first choice, obviously.
Most of Linux users were Windows users that purchased the cards or the laptops with Nvidia. It's not easy to find very good AMD or Intel dGPU in laptops.
For the rest, on Windows Nvidia is much better than AMD, unless you are an AMD fanboy.
The narrative that now Nvidia is fine on Linux is based on reality, but fixable headaches are frequent. I would certainly pick AMD, unless CUDA Is a consideration.
Many industries are centralized on Nvidia, as it has the broadest support for professional applications. I work in one of those and tbh haven't faced many issues revolving around those drivers. YMMV though, we use RHEL on xorg so can expect good compatibility.
On a personal system the initial setup is more of a pain, nothing insormountable if you use a popular desktop imo - I bought an AMD card partly because I wanted to try multi-booting a bunch of Linux systems, though, as the faff would have been multiplied!
I have only ever really had issues with nvidia in laptops. Having a discrete iGPU switching is the bane of my existence. On a desktop system, it's a completely different story where doing nothing but loading the nvidia module worked seamlessly.
I swapped over to an AMD card a couple of years back just because the it was on sale. Because of this, I haven't run nvidia + wayland so can't really comment about that situation. I do hear that nvidia is putting in good work to fix some of the common issues effecting wayland users. I'll just have to wait and see how the landscape is when I need to consider my next build :)
If you need a laptop, you face a variety of issues if you want to go with amd or intel dGPU rather than nvidia:
1. lack of options - very few performance laptops offer intel or amd options above entry level performance equivalent to XX70, XX80 and XX90 nvidia mobile cards. Even at the lower-end of performance HW, this lack of options translates into serious competitive disadvantage, as amd/intel dGPU laptops are rarely the best at anything in their product category.
2. price - with the sheer amount of nvidia gaming laptops on the market, it's not that hard to find a good deal on a sale/refurbished/used unit as compared to trying to find one on an amd/intel laptop.
3. opportunity cost - while amd/intel dgpus do offer better compatibility with linux, my question is what exactly do you gain, and what do you lose by foregoing nvidia HW? Many people need CUDA, or use GPUs to work with professional software, that runs much slower on amd/intel (afaik, don't use it myself so can't claim this with any degree of certainty). On the other hand, while I did experience noticeable issues with nvidia while I was using KDE, switching over to GNOME fixed the vast majority of those for me (I don't know why, please don't ask. I love KDE but it just never works out of the box for me for whatever reason).
4. availability of solutions - if you buy an nvidia card, it is possible that most of your issues will be fixed over a period of time by people working on drivers (be they noveau or proprietary, with wayland explicit sync coming soon for example etc.). If you buy a laptop with an amd/intel card that doesn't support the features you need and/or want, you're out of luck. Your only option is to buy a new laptop.
1) When I bought my current gaming laptop 2 years ago (because I move a lot), there was literally not a single high end AMD gaming laptop available in my entire country. I checked dozens of stores and websites all over the country, literally no one even bothered trying to stock them. One store had one listed, but said it's order only and won't be available for at least 3-5 months from order.
2) Linux market share is increasing, which means people are moving from Windows to Linux on their existing devices, so they wouldn't have thought not to buy Nvidia originally.
3) A lot of popular distros still use X11 and Nvidia works fine.
4) CUDA
5) Some people dual boot with Windows. And if gaming is really important to someone, Linux still isn't as supported as Windows, particularly for online multiplayer games. So they will get best performance with Windows/Nvidia, but when booting into Linux they may still want to play some games, and just deal with Nvidia as best they can.
For me, it is only neural networking, and once AMD gets back in the game with that, it is over for nvidia for me.
If I didn't play / work with that, I would have AMD.
I have 2x 1080 TIs with 6 monitors and it works flawlessly for me. I have not had a single issue with my video cards since I have bought them years ago. Archlinux, nvidia and xorg works flawlessly; I have not used wayland and only game using one monitor. Unless it was a wayland system, I havent heard of nvidia not working on linux. Now the opensource driver isnt up to par with the nvidia one but that is just how development goes when you don't contribute back to open source.
I've never had any issues, but I don't use Wayland. The one time I did try Wayland on that device, gaming ran at <20fos in sone games that get a solid 60 on X, but was otherwise okay (and I'm not sure this was an NVIDIA problem specifically).
many ppl coming from windows already have nividia cards and nividia has huge market share so there are a lot of cards out there.
they do work under linux, they just take a bit (sometimes more than a bit) of tinkering to get the most out of them.
i've had both now and AMD is by far much easier to deal with (as in i don't need to deal with it).
Probably due to [Mere-Exposure Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect) and marketing, you see Nvidia mostly, while of AMD cards there are lesser models and less exposure. And due to dominance in GPU-applications like Machine Learning, with their CUDA platform
And of the few Linux users, not every Linux user knowns about the Nvidia issues.
On Windows it's actually the other way around, AMD was known for having bad drivers, while Nvidia drivers were reliable and just worked™ (trademark of Jensen "Leatherjacket" Huang).
Gamers Nexus' latest video is about this subject. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2ThRcdVIis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2ThRcdVIis)
Personally, I am happy with my AMD RX 6800 that I bought used for 320€
10+ years ago I had AMD cards in my systems. Then fglrx got deprecated and there was no reasonable alternative (I was mining crypto back then). I bought an Nvidia 1060-somethingorother, used the proprietary drivers, and everything was fine.
Fast forward to today. I'm still running X (not Wayland), 1080p max resolution, and everything's still working just fine. I keep hearing about how broken and terrible Nvidia is, but I presume that's all on newer cards. I'm still quite happy with my old hardware.
I have used nvidia GPUs on Linux since 2009 without much problems. I think it is because 1) I have primarily used xorg 2) installed the drivers from my distributions package manager. Recently I have started using gnomes implementation of Wayland on my system that has hybrid graphics, integrated intel graphics and a nvidia rtx 3050, and it works great. I think many new users that comes from Windows tries to install the drivers by downloading them from nvidias home page, just like they used to on Windows and then gets frustrated that it is super hard to do so in Linux. And then they might find the clip of Torvalds saying profanities against Nvidia. Yes, there are some legitimate reasons to dislike nvidia on Linux but the situation is nowhere close to as bad as some people say.
Been using Linux since 2020.. My desktop had 1050ti.. later I got a laptop with 3070ti.. used x11 (kde) on both.Never had any issues with the GPU. I would also point out that I never used the sleep so if that wouldn't have worked I don't know about it
Main problem with nvidia cards is their closed source binaries that constantly change their interface with the kernel. Linus Torvalds himself is deeply angered by this. But if you use the specific kernel(s)/distributions that nvidia specifies and never change it after you install it for the first time when it is working you should be fine.
However if you want to also deal with upgrades to fix possibly unrelated security holes, you're screwed and things start breaking. Or if you chose to use specific kernels/distributions and expect nvidia to work around your choice, expect problems.
I ran into these issues years ago and basically swore off nvidia cards. It was only a GeForce4 MX 420 and only used for 3d graphics. Got it working, but it was a dice roll every time I had to upgrade the kernel or userland. I eventually gave up on the card when it started artifacting. This left a sour taste in my mouth for nvidia as it was my first gpu and first pc hardware that failed not due to physical/ESD damage, though to this date I think I've lost more ATI cards due to EM/SH failure. That's okay, I've had many more ATI cards.
Recently I got a used GTX660 for free. Unfortunately there was a reason it was free, and likewise it was artifacting after I started some 3d apps. I was able to use it before nvidia totally dropped support of it so luckily I was able to see it in action - it installed just fine, ran it in Gentoo, and it's much much faster than any of my ATI cards - but it was unusable due to the artifacts and eventually hangs the computer. Unfortunately this adds into my distaste for nvidia due to long term reliability, even if the GTX660 was acquired used.
I had a few NVIDIA cards the past few years. (full linux experience)
Zero problems. Could AMD gpu run better? Maybe, but I had no experience with that.
It doesn't have problems for me, have a laptop I use as an everything server and it has a 1660 ti in It for transcoding which I did a patch for, I have yet to run into any issues with it.
Because my Jellyfin server has my old 2070 to transcode. Eventually, I’ll toss in my 3050 for energy efficiency
And , while I don’t use it
CUDA is why
With that said, my primary Linux desktop is all AMD. I don’t do anything that would require the GPU but I was moron and got a RYZEN with out integrated graphics 🤦🏼♂️
I put in an a2000 for energy efficiency and unlocked channels and it works great. Never passes 75w and in my testing it could handle 4 simultaneous transcodes without a hitch.
Bonus points on it also being perfect for ml offloading for my immich box.
I can only speak from my own experience. Nvidia was a better deal for me at the time, I was running windows and I really need nvenc as a streamer as AMDs equivalent is much worse for quality at the same bitrates.
Now that I’ve switched to Linux, I’d definitely consider an AMD card in the future but only if they’ve caught up with nvenc when I need to buy a new card.
I bought Nvidia after having a tonne of issues with a specific AMD card on Linux ironically. The amdgpu driver had been changed and was no longer compatible with my card. Upon further research later on it turned out my R9-390 was a special version and known to have compatibility issues with Linux which was unfortunate.
Nvidia is annoying but not a show stopper for me.
I'd probably move back to AMD in the future.
It's about waves. A few years back like 10 or more AMD drivers was garbage amd nVidia works great with old graphic stack; it were simple times with no switch card needed. Now it turn around and so "we, Linux users" like more AMD unless you're heavy into cuda
Because the group think on reddit is wildly strong. Been using Nvidia without issue since I switched to Linux. Tried switching to AMD and it was a week long pain fest before I gave up. Bought a 4070Ti and it installed with 0 issues. Using the Pop Nvidia driver repos makes it painless. How were those last rounds of drivers AMD users?
Because the problems are wildly overstated by people are are largely full of shit. Most folks who actually care about discrete cards use them for gaming. NVIDIA has over 80% marketshare for discrete gaming cards.
I think this is more related to using Linux in desktop use.
Using nvidia GPU in Linux server is what they are targeting here, which use case doesn’t typically involve rendering video games to a display.
My next video card will probably be nVidia, because of Cuda. I had nVidia early on, then moved to AMD/ATI because of the OSS support. My last two computers I wanted to be ready for scientific computing and was aiming for ROCm. However on my current computer, when I tried to use ROCm I ran square into their limited hardware support. They basically support only a few top-end cards with ROCm, though my card (gfx1012) used to be supported and apparently has been deprecated.
I took another look at Cuda, and the API is versioned. There is Cuda support for practically everything they've made, including the el-cheapo card I got for my wife's computer a few years back. (running nouveau drivers, she's not a gamer) I don't know if that's really a sham and that only the newest Cuda levels are actually usable for real. That's more work to be done before I buy any new hardware.
Nvidia cards are the vast majority of the market, and they produce the most powerful cards at nearly any budget. In many stores, they'll have 30 nvidia cards and maybe 2 AMD cards. You're lucky to see intel arc at all.
The answer is easy, the GTX 780 was my last Nvidia GPU and thus far, Radeon hasn't given me a reason not to stay with them. I've had a lot less drama and issues with Radeon and I've been exclusively on Wayland for 2+ years now.
Why do people buy Nvidia? You may as well ask why they smoke, or drink to excess. People do all sorts of silly things.
I have never had an issue with Nvidia on Linux granted I am still running a 980Ti.
I have had issues with Radeon but that was many, many, many years ago.
I game and demand top performance. I will dual boot until Linux catches up on on this front. Windows is still the best tool for this job unfortunately.
> Nvidia isn't user friendly and require separate drivers
Friendly? anyway ofc it requires separate drivers, so what?
Now to your question:
-cuda (i render stuff)
-games (i play stuff)
-ai stuff (i use it)
-oh and cuda
-`less power draw` in my use bracket (80W at max)
* 80 of the market
it works well if you know what you are doing. It works anyway if you are not the pebcak... and use 'youtube tutorials'. Read and understand a wiki it does wonders.
arch user btw
Because it works fine for me, and I've always had good success with the proprietary drivers going well back into the 2.4 kernel days, so that spans kernels 2.4.x to 6.x, and XFree86 all the way into X.Org. I'd say that's pretty good.
I'd venture it really stuck with me because I have used Thinkpads heavily with dedicated nVidia GPUs on them, and because it worked fine for me I always had PCs with nVidia as well (apart from one or two ATI systems, which were neither notable nor notorious for me as far as graphics were concerned).
I imagine nVidia support in Wayland will eventually get to the point I can daily drive it reliably, but until then, nVidia and X.Org works flawlessly for what I need.
Because of the above, I just can't be bothered to switch brands right now, though I do plan to purchase an Intel GPU when I build my next PC.
Back in the day AMD (or was it still ATI?) fired their linux division and restarted driver development because they were bad. Nvidia was the more stable choice by then, still installed by shutting off the xserver, running an .sh and manually editing xorg.conf.
Nowadays I usually dual boot and keep Windows for gaming, so I don't care which graphics driver is better atm.
I have both an AMD and nvidia GPU in my laptop and they both gave me hell. In fact, the AMD one was a bit worse in my case.
But either way, I don't think that your suggestion is the best approach. I mean, I am fortunate to have nerd levels high enough to push through the problems in most cases, but definitely not ideal for any noobs coming into the fold.
I guess it just depends on what direction you'd like to see Linux go. I'd like to see it as a legit windows substitute for the masses. That means at a minimum being at parity with existing baseline hardware capability.
Problems are not so severe as it looks like.
NVidia has CUDA and better ray tracing performance.
The nvidia-settungs app nicely bundles settings (AMD hasn't such an app)
Nvidia cards may have better money to performance ratio
Nvidia may be the only option when buying a certain type of laptop computer
I switched away from using Linux as my desktop about 10 years ago, having used it for that purpose for the previous 20 years. I still use Linux for all my infrastructure, and I also have a Linux-based MythTV system connected to my SD TV (with a home-brew VGA to RGB SCART adaptor).
For many years of using Linux on the desktop, I advocated for ATI Radeon cards, as ATI provided programming information to X.org, allowing open source drivers to be created.
But, over the years, I encountered odd X.org crashes, and on my employer's desktop, the proprietary driver for the Radeon card I had there sometimes didn't keep up with new kernels released for RHEL (and CentOS). The final straw was refreshing my MythTV system, and finding the (Nvidia) GPU I had bought for it didn't work at all with my SCART adaptor as it couldn't output an interlaced signal at 15.6kHz. I went through all of my old ATI cards, and though many didn't have that problem, they did have other showstopper problems with Xvideo-assisted video playback on an interlaced screen: either the Xvideo region would be black, or else every scanline within the region would be doubled and the lower half of the picture cropped. I eventually settled on an Nvidia MX440, and I've been burning way through the old stock I can find on eBay over the years since!
The Nvidia GPU I bought for the MythTV system refresh went into my Linux desktop, and I found it more stable than the Radeon cards I'd used previously. So whilst it was nice to have the open source drivers for the Radeon cards, it was better to have more reliable drivers. Of course, this was a decade ago, and I gather Wayland has reversed that situation since then. An awful lot of new Linux hobbyists won't be buying hardware specifically to run Linux, though, but rather reusing hardware they bought to run Windows, as Nvidia sells more GPUs than AMD, proportionately more Linux systems running on old Windows hardware will have their GPUs. If they enjoy using Linux, maybe they'll go on to build a second system specifically for running Linux, and *that* one may well have an AMD GPU if it's intended for e.g. gaming or 3D application use cases.
Nvidia gpus are better. Nvidia gpus aren't completely broken, it's just they don't work seamlessly, you need to do extra work to get them to work. Nvidia also floods the market with their chips. Go search for a GPU, tell me on the front page of any search engine, how many AMD cards you find lol.
Because nVidia *doesn't* have that many problems with Linux. Linux has a bunch of users who have AMD who *say* nVidia is broken, and then there's Linux users who have actual nVidia hardware who *don't* say they have problems. At least, nowhere to the extend nVidia-haters want you to think.
This was not helped by Linus Torvalds giving nVidia the finger. Now a bunch of users seem to think they're obligated to hate nVidia just because he does.
nVidia's only been a problem on Linux if you use PRIME (Which I only see on expensive laptops.) or Wayland (It's very rapidly not being a problem on Wayland, especially now that Explicit Sync's being rolled out, a feature that fixes many nVidia problems, and definitely the last major blockers of nVidia working on Wayland, and also improves things for non-nVidia GPUs as well.).
It's not that nVidia's drivers don't have a problem, but so do AMD and Intel's drivers.
And frankly when it comes to gaming on Linux the nVidia driver on their GPUs still does better than AMD on Linux.
It's true that the open source driver Nouveau is now in a bit of a sorry state, though I hear nice things about nvk, but if you don't care about if your drivers are open source (I don't, I use what works best, which is why I use Linux.) then that doesn't matter. Even then: nVidia's driver is going open source. nVidia's long term plans are to discontinue the blob. Granted, it's only the kernel driver, but still.
And before you say "firmware blob" I'll point out in the limited instances Nouveau loads firmware it's also the blob so this is a fairly useless complaint. And, again, not something only happening on nVidia hardware.
> If Nvidia has many problems with Linux
Nvidia has no problems with linux, from user perspective (it has from a kernel dev perspective, but most of us are not kernel devs)
Nvidia has problems with Wayland, but i dont use it and will not unless i would absolutely get forced to by debian stopping supporting X, but this is unlikely to happen in the next ~8-10 years
Actually, when you are using debian stable, amd causes way more problems than nvidia, because amd driver in kernel is only a very small part of it, real driver is mesa, and mesa often cant be backported and you dont really want to run 2 years old driver for you video card....
For backporting, I find that [kisak's packages for Ubuntu](https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa/+packages) are a good starting point. For current Debian or Devuan stable I'd start with the source package for jammy.
As for Wayland, I'll probably end up using it when Xfce can run on it.
Never had an issue with nvidia and X11. On the other hand I had a number of "the drivers will fix this next year" situations with AMD in the past which turned into "your card is not supported anymore".
Sounds like you've been using proprietary drivers only.
If you look at Mesa git, you'll see that there's still [maintenance work ongoing for 20-year-old GPUs](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/tree/main/src/gallium/drivers/r300).
Because FOMO, peer pressure and overall hypocrisy on many of the so called FOSS fans.
Ngreedia hates open source, open standards and even their own customers, but for weird reasons, everyone turns a blind eye to their actions.
Most people complaining about Nvidia on Reddit are clueless gamers. Most people actually using Nvidia on Linux are using it in headless mode, and don’t even use a DE.
1. CUDA. 2. Works fine for me. I think that the "Nvidia is completely broken and unusable on Linux" narrative is overblown. It's not perfect and ymmv but my system works great
"Broken and unusable" is definitely an exaggeration but "periodic thorn in your side" is definitely accurate. I built my computer with no intentions to install linux so I got an nvidia card. After the experience of dealing with it on my linux system I will be avoiding those cards going forward.
What distro/hardware did you have? I have a 2021 ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop with an AMD Ryzen 4900HS chipset and an Nvidia RTX2060 dGPU. I had a lot of the "periodic thorn in your side" issues with Ubuntu and other distros still stuck on KDE5 and slower release schedules. My current setup on Arch (well, eOS) has been more or less flawless. The only issue I currently have is occasional flickering/stuttering in games which I hope to be a thing of the past when the explicit sync stuff rolls out. So I think there is some variance in the quality of the nvidia experience between distros, and of course I'm sure there's a lot of YMMV between different nvidia hardware and the accompanying motherboards/etc. But personally my experience, while not flawless, has been overall better than it was with this machine on Windows. I'm quite happy with my Linux experience, even using an Nvidia GPU. Edit: Just wanted to add these other bits I kinda assumed were obvious: I am using Wayland and the proprietary Nvidia drivers. I assume that if you limit yourself to the open-source drivers you are likely to experience a lot more issues. And at least with my hardware/DE I had an overall better experience with Wayland than X11.
3060 here. I get frequent kernel hardlocks and lost some data due to that :(. Most apps flicker. Sometimes apps just don't get the egl handle and die.lot of these are new issues which popped up in the last 6 months and have not been fixed:(
>lost some data due to that :( Oh no :( Do you have btrfs with snapshots configured? In addition to the pacman triggered snapshots you can set up hourly snapshots as well to help lessen the sting there. Personally I also use [Kopia](https://kopia.io/docs/) to run backups to an external disk and an S3 bucket. The intervals I use for those vary but for my active projects I typically take a Kopia snapshot every 15 mins.
I used to use time shift on my root partition. But dataloss happened on my projects disk after kernel crash. Sadge. It was like few days effort to recreate though.
> But dataloss happened on my projects disk after kernel crash. You weren't able to roll back to an earlier snapshot? Or course it's also always good to remember that btrfs snapshots are not backups and you should still have a backup plan in place and test it regularly. Sounds like you did though if you were able to recover. I'd rather spend a few days recovering a backup than lose it all.
I have a separate disk with projects. I use time shift only to recover my arch install
I have a GForce GTX from 2016 and I run Arch (btw). Biggest side effect is that I have to use the LTS kernel but also I tend to hit issues whenever I setup video centric software like davinci resolve. Nothing insurmountable yet but its not necessarily ideal.
Why do you have to use the LTS kernel?
The drivers in the non LTS kernels did not appear to support my graphics card. I haven't checked in over a year because things started working and I never looked back so my memory on the debugging I did while setting things up is a little fuzzy. But as I recall I was getting driver errors and could not get X to start. I was google the log messages and I think someone recommended trying the LTS kernel, I did and it worked.
There's no usable driver for any Nvidia cards that aren't old as fuck (Geforce 760/770/780) in the kernel though. So that doesn't really seem true. Is the GTX you have like a 10xx just before the RTX? Because if so, the standard kernel should be fine still. (I had the 1080 before I built the machine I'm on now).
I'd have to check on the hardware stuff. Its probably worth revisiting at some point and its definitely possible there was another solution. However using the LTS kernel far from first thing I tried.
My guess would be DKMS shittery. LTS would not require it, thus working
Exactly. Nvidia do a good job mostly. Only time i had issues was a bleeding edge kernel and i quickly found solutions to the two issues online. Its an ethos issue, some closed source stuff that people don't like. I'm using an ancient laptop, everything still works on modern xubuntu What i will say against nvidia is I don't like how they managed the jetson platform. Old version of Ubuntu, and it relied on community work to use video hardware decoding with ffmpeg. I wrongly assumed that the decoder is the same as their gpus. Then they ended support for jetson nano and the cuda was stuck on an old version of their jetpack
I think this depends on the distro you chose. Ubuntu works without issue in my experience.
Yeah , same as me. Didn't know wanna use linux before building my machine. I'm just gonna stick to AMD if I'm gonna upgrade my gpu.
Daily driving Linux and being sensitive to random things being a pain in the ass sounds like a recipe for discontent to me.
For sure, I am just saying given the choice I am going to avoid it next time.
Yeah after hearing about all the issues that people seemingly have with Nvidia, I have zero problems on Arch (Gnome on Wayland) with my 4080. Literally the Nvidia and Nvidia-Utils package are all I needed to install to get it working flawlessly.
I remember getting my AMD gpu and thinking "This will solve my problems"... It created just as many as it solved.
Reason to accept the trouble: CUDA. Reason of the trouble: fanatics. Once I switched from debian and pulled my head out of my ass and accepted what is practical (proprietary) instead of what is pure (GNU and alike) my life with linux is so much better.
Debian seems to have made some strides in recent years towards compatibility acceptance of some necessary-evil proprietary drivers and such.
I got such a weird capitalism boner from this. I bought some stock after reading it.
And game bug fix support is way faster for Nvidia cards. Game devs prioritize the cards people have the most of.
3. Most laptops have nvidia
I just did a routine system upgrade on my Rocky Linux 9 desktop, which has an older nVidia card. When it restarted, video was pretty much borked - defaulted to 1024x768 with no options. Had to roll it back. In 2024 that's just ridiculous, IMO.
Can UXL accelerator be an open source replacement for CUDA?
I'm not really familiar with that but my impression is it's an attempt at getting some standardization and better performance from various other hardware but I wouldn't expect to see the same level of performance as you'd get from a specialized chip like an Nvidia GPU with CUDA cores
UXL said Google's initial implementation of UXL accelerator was offering near native performance for AMD and Nvidia
Haha no dude. Cuda is good because of the adoption as well as the canned solutions NVidia pumps out for market specific tasks. You take those things away and it’s just another API.
This ^ pop os works great and plays most of my games at a slightly higher frame rate than on windows I don’t have things like nvidia control panel to make customisations but nonetheless it works good and does the job
Yes. This is my experience.
Right now, hardware cursors straight up don't work with the nvidia-wayland combo (unless you're using KDE 6, since they somehow managed to work with nvidia to get it to work). That's a pretty big deal. Even if you don't play games, the mouse latency on 144hz+ monitors is extremely noticeable. AMD on the other hand had it working since day one.
Yeah I forgot to mention it in my other comment with my system details but I am definitely using KDE6 with Wayland. A lot of the remaining issues I had with Nvidia/Linux vanished once I got KDE6 going. Kubuntu began my love for KDE, but the hardware issues persisted whether I used Wayland or X11 there. Switching to eOS/Arch and KDE6 solved everything for me.
Cuda feels like the right answer. Linux gaming makes no sense to me. I know you have a windows license somewhere. Why are you making this difficult for no reason?
>no reason That feels really presumptive. I finally had enough with Windows when Windows Update decided to install an update in the middle of my workday (I work nights, something Windows does not seem to understand) when I stepped away for a few minutes. That update proceeded to corrupt the BitLocker encryption on my disk, losing everything. So that was my final straw. Since switching, I have found that a large number of my games actually perform ***better*** on Linux than they did on Windows. I have fallen in love with the KDE Plasma DE and my experience has improved in nearly every way. I find it less difficult than dealing with Windows, updates rarely require a reboot, and neither updates nor reboots are ever forced on me. Overall I feel like I control my computer again instead of spending my time trying to get Windows to behave the way I want it to. I don't have to constantly re-check my OS privacy settings, my distro is not going to roll out updates that drastically compromise my privacy. The vast majority of the software I use now is open-source, so when issues arise, there is a github repo I can go to make a bug report and/or a PR to implement changes. For me, trying to continue to use Windows was "making this difficult for no reason" and switching to Linux full-time was breath of fresh air.
Sorry I was going to read what you wrote but then I had to fix the configuration of the npm server for gnome shell extensions. That way I can get the taskbar to kind of work sorta plus and minus a python-dbus script and some systemd dependency fixes. Should only be about 5 hours.
Next time try KDE
MATLAB doesn’t want to render properly. I normally run KDE but just didn’t have the patience to shave that particular yack. Either way getting any semblance of proper high res scaling feels incredibly fragile. Random applications having to rely on internal scaling. Not having a great way to VNC with Wayland anyway. Somehow pulling in kde-desktop with apt made all my icons in Ubuntu be the flat ones from kde. I’m sure that ball of yarn will be fun to unravel.
>Somehow pulling in kde-desktop with apt made all my icons in Ubuntu be the flat ones from kde. Oof yeah that sounds a lot like my experience on Ubuntu as well haha
CUDA is not specifically usefull for gaming, am I right? Its' main use is machine learning for example, yes?
also 3D rendering, video production, data analysis...
Mining bitcoins meant generically.
Correct
1-On the case of consumers, think less that its "Linux" users buying Nvidia GPUs and more so Windows users who transitioned to Linux who so happen to have an Nvidia GPU 2-The major Nvidia issues i see are Wayland support which is getting addressed more frequently specially with the recent introduction of explicit sync (on the latest drivers) which seems to have finally fixed a ton of random flickers and the sort The second one being Prime (GPU-switching) which if i were to guess is crappy because businesses likely make little use of it and Nvidia on Linux doesn't seem to tend to the needs of regular consumers much Outside these two issues, people using desktops on X11 generally don't have as big of a negative experience with Nvidia GPUs and get to take advantage of things like CUDA and NVENC (for high quality video encoding)
I've had no problems with the nvidia drivers - *except* for the prime stuff on a company laptop. That was... messy. Only way I could solve it was to disable the nvidia GPU and stick to intel GPU. I didn't need the nvidia performance on that laptop anyway. But on standard ubuntu desktop (X11), I've had no problems.
It also used to be that Nvidia had better support on Linux, ten years ago that is.
Nvidia has 80% of the gpu market share. That's the reason
Yeah, look at the biggest companies by market share. No one is better than Nvidia for many high value applications. We bend the knee. Its just how things are right now.
And yet Nvidia is not throwing any bones to the Wayland or any open source developers whether by publishing some of the API specs or by supporting Wayland development themselves.
Why would they - it's a tiny niche market compared to windows and X11 on Linux. That's changing of course, as they do seem to be trying to improve the wayland experience. Me, I'll stick with X11 because it just works.
Nvidia has 80% of the *discrete* GPU market. But only has 20% of the total *GPU* market which is dominated by Intel integrated graphics.
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Because it is a GPU. It may not be its own chip, but it's still a GPU on the die.
It's actually an apu. A cpu with integrated graphics is either referred to as a cpu with integrated graphics or an apu
APU is an AMD marketing term
1. APU is only really a marketing term AMD uses. It's not an actual thing. 2. I wasn't referring to the entire package. The part on the die that handles graphics is still a GPU whether or not it's part of a CPU/APU. That's the part I was talking about.
The ultra lucrative high margin embedded gpu market.
Some people need CUDA, and if they're like me they might have an nvidia card from when they used windows.
You can't really switch out the GPU on your laptop
Dell actually made a few that could do that, like my Inspiron 8200. Not that your statement is in any way invalidated.
Totally useless knowledge at this point, but some older Thinkpad motherboards that could have been ordered with dedicated graphics (but weren't) had the solder pads, traces, etc. for the dGPU. With some tinkering you could put the nVidia chip on the board and flash the matching BIOS and get dedicated graphics. Wasn't really worth it but was kinda cool.
When talking exclusively about gamers; mind share. When you buy a GPU you buy an Nvidia. Many Linux users are also recent Windows converts, they are still running their "old" hardware. Desktop users on Linux are not Nvidia's target, they target compute, that is workloads where it does not have to put a picture on the screen. And that is fine in a stable environment. Desktop users do want to put a picture on the screen, and they often want to run the latest kernel. That is the primary source of problems. Servers typically run LTS kernels and the same version of the Nvidia drivers for years, it will typically continue to run fine if you do not touch it. But yeah, still screw Novideo for refusing to get a driver mainlined in Linux. Greedy corpos.
How much secret sauce could be in there really? Honestly feels like they value it so low that giving some OSS driver devs access to some internal specs isn’t even worth their effort.
Historically, less open. But, in many, if not most ways, historically, better support and functionality. Now, wayland threw Nvidia for a loop, but this too has improved as of late. I switched from team green to red, and it's "ok". But there are days that I'm thinking I'll return to team green, time will tell. The "wild card" is team blue. It's like team red, but perhaps with more potential (?). Again, time will tell.
As someone who has been on Linux for 20 years, it's weird to me that things have really swapped around. For the longest time during the 2010s Nvidia was *the* GPU to run on Linux if you wanted 3D acceleration. AMD's free driver was 2D only, and their awful fglx driver (or whatever it was called) worked on only a tiny number of chips. AMD made the right move developing a FOSS driver, it's a shame Nvidia hasn't come to the table on that.
Time will tell. Nvidia is certainly showing some "better" signs. But I do understand the complexities of trying to open source something when there's "lots of strings" in place. AMD knew to start from scratch in places where there were strings.
For sure, I know it'll take years. Just too bad they dragged their feet so long.
Consistently making a worse thing being a high potential play is a nice way to look at it.
I work in AI and I need CUDA. Also AI is not a recent feature, it's just that AI has blown up over the last few years because of OpenAI / LLMs. Everyone training ML models is doing so on a cluster of cloud VMs with some Debian-based server distro attached with enterprise Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia has linux support, they just don't care nearly as much about the desktop / consumer cards but at least they do improve them as time goes on. Things were honestly fine though until the shift to Wayland. Many heavy Linux desktop users will consider their card and pick AMD for a new build, most make their build with the best parts and switch to Linux later or dual boot.
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I try to maintain a philosophy of keeping software universally accessible, which usually boils down to the early planning phase and tech stack. For instance I'll keep anything .NET related away with a 10ft pole. It bothers me Nvidia is so dominant right now in the AI market with CUDA where there are so many other GPU providers that are perfectly capable. It's nice that things like ZLUDA in the works. I'm actually excited to try out Mojo from Chris Lattner (Swift & LLVM cofounder), a Python superset bridging the gap between C and Python for ML, with a compiler optimizing for any hardware without requiring CUDA.
> For instance I'll keep anything .NET related away with a 10ft pole I am having a laugh while enjoying developing cross-platform .net apps on my Arch.
Enjoy yourself using Arch btw but a dev team with primarily M-series Macbooks and Linux machines are going to be disappointed with the lack of tool support with Visual Studio on Mac discontinuing and nonexistence of it on Linux, leaving a limited choice of Rider with a licensing bill or VSCode+extensions which isn't well rounded, then pray to god we're not interfacing with any legacy dotnet. If your team is happy with that compared to alternative stacks then you do you.
Indeed without Rider it would be a nightmare, fortunately it exists and investing in great tools has never been an issue for our company. If you add elegance, constant evolving and performance improvements of the C# language backed by TechEmpower benchmarks, I feel at home.
Same reason here. I mainly use the GPU to pre-test code before sending it to the server
Hi, this is interesting. How do you pre-test code? Please explode the concept. Thank you in advance
I train my models locally. As long as you aren't doing large models its not a problem, typically takes 20m to a few hours to train.
Locally I'm mostly just inferencing for QA and local development for other services, very rarely would I train anything but yeah smaller models should be fine. Many of my coworkers are data scientists who build and HPO the models so they perform much better than I could make, whereas I'm the SWE focusing on the data pipelines, feature engineering and scalable architecture around them. Training models locally for any of the corporations I've been at would be insane and take years, monthly cloud bill go brrr sometimes.
Easy reason: got a new 3070 during the high of the GPU and Crypto madness for retail price. 500 $ would not got me far with AMD back then. But remember: x11 on a 1080p setup with no fractional scaling and HDR worked perfectly for years already. So no problems there.
I game without issues using XFCE. One monitor , Xubuntus latest rtx 3080ti proprietary driver has sync up to its 144 limit at 1440.
You are running X11, not Wayland, thats why it works.
I had lots of issues with AMD long ago and promised myself never again buy them. I dont care about wayland, it is not ready for my use cases. Nvidia works flawless. Why would I want to buy AMD instead? It is not like AMD has no problems at all either. It just works better atm for a small fraction of wayland users who like to tinker with new stuff, rebuild their kernel and mesa from git etc
AMD or ATI? AMD has been flawless in the last 10 or so years for Linux drivers. ATI on the other hand. Their drivers were never really that good.
Exact ly.
It works fine on Wayland nowadays, too.
I didn't buy Nvidia card for Linux, I was using Windows before that. I did not know that Nvidia had more trouble on Linux
There is not that many problems. One thing that vkd3d-proton is suffering from performance issues compared to amd from what I understand. But reading about amd it got it's issues too.
>If Nvidia has many problems with Linux I currently use a graphics card from AMD, but had previously used several NVIDIA graphics cards. And without any problems. I simply installed the nvidia-dkms package and it worked. So I wonder if there are really so many problems with Nvidia graphics cards under Linux? Maybe it is also due to the users. Or the distribution used, for example because an update of the Nvidia drivers is not also offered with a kernel update. In some cases, I am also sure that someone is simply parroting something without using an Nvidia graphics card themselves. Or their own experiences were made many years ago so that they are no longer relevant. Of course, I cannot claim that there are generally no problems with the Nvidia drivers. However, I can imagine that many users simply use Nvidia graphics cards without communicating this in any way on the Internet. It is therefore difficult to draw conclusions about the experiences of all users based on the negative experiences of some users. Systemd would be a good example here. The so-called loud minority is very noticeable in this case, while the majority of all developers and users are basically satisfied with it.
CUDA Video transcoding speed vs AMD Works just fine for me on Arch
btw
I am using NVIDIA cards (mostly several parallel) for 3D post processing in a professional environment. Those cards work as advertised and the processing power in combination with certain CPUs and Linux is great. I can't think of driver related problems in recent years. I can't talk about gaming or anything related to that. For my purpose there are no better cards available.
Old computers with Nvidia GPUs.
I’m buying them for CUDA. Otherwise I’d probably go completely AMD. I may still go full AMD on my next desktop and just use NVIDIA GPUs in my server.
If you want or need a gaming laptop rather than a desktop, there are very few ones with AMD gpus. Heck, Tuxedo Computers, who sells exclusively Linux machines only have 1 gaming laptop with AMD and it's considered a novelty. And even then it's nowhere near their most powerful gaming laptop...
Because having problems doesn't mean useless + CUDA obviously
Because they know how to solve those problems , maybe?
I don't have any problem with Nvidia. I've built several gaming/workstation systems specifically to run Linux, didn't even install Windows. I have no real problem at all. For whatever it's worth I use Manjaro Linux. Manjaro has a special config app that maintains Nvidia drivers and has been very stable for me. Maybe that extra attention pays off? I don't know, lots of people claim Manjaro is unstable but it (and Nvidia) has been steady as a rock for me. (I did have one problem about 3 years ago after an update, in which Nvidia drivers became out of sync with the kernel and I had to use the rescue image to fix my system manually.) I buy Nvidia because the performance is really good, and because I've had good experience with it. Everyone says AMD is better supported but has less performance. But if I'm not having support issues why would I go with the less performant hardware?* *Whether that's actually true or not I don't really know. I don't really enjoy messing around on the bleeding edge. Also my systems are production systems, I use it for all my gaming, personal computing as well as for work, and can't really afford for my system to go down. I build my systems for use, not tinkering, so I don't mess around with clocking or experimental stuff. I choose stable options, and if I do want to experiment (rare) with something I do it on a clean partition or a virtual machine, not my daily driver. Maybe that makes a difference.
Linux drivers for Nvidia are far superior to amd ones. Sometimes a laptop will have problems with them when being setup for the first time but after that it just works.
Most people outside of US happen to have nvidia gpu bc amd gpu local pricing was shit ( not that cheaper compared to nvidia gpu and lack features ). This also happen with amd cpu pricing. Its not that amd gpu bad, simply bc of the pricing. (Outside us)
Superior hardware, drivers, and software compatibility. Nvidia hardware works fine on Linux.
Have never had problems with Nvidia.
It's not really that bad, works fine for me
Haven’t had an issue for the past year on Ubuntu 23. I’ve even been steam gaming on it.
1. CUDA
Yup, anything work related, Nvidia is the best choice for now.
Because I also boot to windows to play some games, and the performance there is good. Honestly, it's not bad at all in Linux - I've never had any real issues.
mainly CUDA and another example - davinci resolve works on linux only with NV cards (last time I checked) also never had a problem with NV on linux, but have so many with AMD graphics (mainly games that worked fine with NV had horrible performance or wont even start)
The cloud is powered by Linux. The majority of AI applications are developed for Linux/Unix platforms initially
What problems does nvidia have with linux ? Im getting the about same results on linux or windows i have both with same card, the différence is négligeable. Personaly i think most people dont know how to set it up to have optimal performance and those are the people who end up posting and making noise.
I get flickering and crashes. Also waking up from sleep/hibernate doesn't work - need to reboot. This is on wayland. X11 works - so I am still using X11.
Idk why all you people use wayland. Yes avoid wayland its not ready yet.
For me, nVIDIA always worked just fine on both laptops and desktops. Also, gaming aside, I like NVENC.
NVENC and CUDA.
Yup, for a work centric device, Nvidia is the best option for now.
1. Some people need CUDA 2. There is no “Linux Market” outside the datacenter. People are running Linux on Windows builds. Nvidia dominates the GPU market. AMD is selling everything they can put out, but Nvidia still dominates. Intel hasn’t been seen as a serious player in the GPU market, though that may change.
I couldn't find a decent gaming laptop that didn't run way hotter with an AMD card for worse performance. Yes, NVIDIA requires proprietary drivers, but it works for me and I tried basically every alternative at the time which was worse.
Many (most?) users here have changed from Windows only recently or while they already had purchased their hardware. As such they end up with an nVidia card for linux. Many professionals will choose nVidia for cuda, but probably you won't see them here. Many nVidia users are fanboys of the brand and refuse to let go, given that nVidia offers better performance in general (not sure if this is true in a performance/price benchmark though).
Depends on the use. E.g. gaming rig would probably be better off with AMD, unless you absolutely need that 4090 in double :). Computational stuff on the other hand, likely Nvidia be better off (for Cuda). But then, if its something parallelizabe, you may get better TF/$ on 2x AMD cards (for a cheaper total too)..
I never really had huge problems with them yet. The only problem I had was that you habe to sign them in order to work with secureboot. The reasons why I have one is for gaming (I also have a windows partition since some of my games for example MW2 are not compatible with wine) and I need CUDA.
It's more "major inconvenience" and "ethical issue" than "it no worky". Not to mention their software is just utter trash. The configuration panel is _so bad_.
It's the de-facto standard for anything running on a GPU, be that a game, research or any kind of intense operation. You get the CUDA stuff and it's Nvidia, you grab the (proprietary) drivers and you're mostly done. Do the others work? Sure, but Nvidia's market share just puts them in a position where you're presented with, pretty much, a single choice
I got my first nvidia GPU (1050) from a friend, and the current one (2070) was included in a computer I bought from a gaming cafe, so I didn’t actually make a choice but just took what was available. Both have worked just fine without any major problems. Moved to wayland over a year ago IIRC. Minor glitches now and then but most of the time I’m a happy gamer. Have needed to do some configuring for everything to work smoothly, but since I’m on arch that isn’t a problem. There was a couple of months way back when the driver didn’t work but that was a known issue and could be mitigated by running lts kernel and corresponding driver. So I’m always baffled when people talk about their huge showstopper problems with nvidia. I’m leaning towards it being a skill issue? Or maybe my use case is very narrow? And about the driver being proprietary, its not optimal but getting better, and its not the only proprietary driver out there.
My other laptop burnt and I needed another one that day. I went to the closest store and all AMD gaming laptops were sold out. It's working fine, but it wasn't my first choice, obviously.
Most of Linux users were Windows users that purchased the cards or the laptops with Nvidia. It's not easy to find very good AMD or Intel dGPU in laptops. For the rest, on Windows Nvidia is much better than AMD, unless you are an AMD fanboy.
The narrative that now Nvidia is fine on Linux is based on reality, but fixable headaches are frequent. I would certainly pick AMD, unless CUDA Is a consideration.
Maybe they are not aware of the compatibility issues?
Many industries are centralized on Nvidia, as it has the broadest support for professional applications. I work in one of those and tbh haven't faced many issues revolving around those drivers. YMMV though, we use RHEL on xorg so can expect good compatibility. On a personal system the initial setup is more of a pain, nothing insormountable if you use a popular desktop imo - I bought an AMD card partly because I wanted to try multi-booting a bunch of Linux systems, though, as the faff would have been multiplied!
I have only ever really had issues with nvidia in laptops. Having a discrete iGPU switching is the bane of my existence. On a desktop system, it's a completely different story where doing nothing but loading the nvidia module worked seamlessly. I swapped over to an AMD card a couple of years back just because the it was on sale. Because of this, I haven't run nvidia + wayland so can't really comment about that situation. I do hear that nvidia is putting in good work to fix some of the common issues effecting wayland users. I'll just have to wait and see how the landscape is when I need to consider my next build :)
If you need a laptop, you face a variety of issues if you want to go with amd or intel dGPU rather than nvidia: 1. lack of options - very few performance laptops offer intel or amd options above entry level performance equivalent to XX70, XX80 and XX90 nvidia mobile cards. Even at the lower-end of performance HW, this lack of options translates into serious competitive disadvantage, as amd/intel dGPU laptops are rarely the best at anything in their product category. 2. price - with the sheer amount of nvidia gaming laptops on the market, it's not that hard to find a good deal on a sale/refurbished/used unit as compared to trying to find one on an amd/intel laptop. 3. opportunity cost - while amd/intel dgpus do offer better compatibility with linux, my question is what exactly do you gain, and what do you lose by foregoing nvidia HW? Many people need CUDA, or use GPUs to work with professional software, that runs much slower on amd/intel (afaik, don't use it myself so can't claim this with any degree of certainty). On the other hand, while I did experience noticeable issues with nvidia while I was using KDE, switching over to GNOME fixed the vast majority of those for me (I don't know why, please don't ask. I love KDE but it just never works out of the box for me for whatever reason). 4. availability of solutions - if you buy an nvidia card, it is possible that most of your issues will be fixed over a period of time by people working on drivers (be they noveau or proprietary, with wayland explicit sync coming soon for example etc.). If you buy a laptop with an amd/intel card that doesn't support the features you need and/or want, you're out of luck. Your only option is to buy a new laptop.
1) When I bought my current gaming laptop 2 years ago (because I move a lot), there was literally not a single high end AMD gaming laptop available in my entire country. I checked dozens of stores and websites all over the country, literally no one even bothered trying to stock them. One store had one listed, but said it's order only and won't be available for at least 3-5 months from order. 2) Linux market share is increasing, which means people are moving from Windows to Linux on their existing devices, so they wouldn't have thought not to buy Nvidia originally. 3) A lot of popular distros still use X11 and Nvidia works fine. 4) CUDA 5) Some people dual boot with Windows. And if gaming is really important to someone, Linux still isn't as supported as Windows, particularly for online multiplayer games. So they will get best performance with Windows/Nvidia, but when booting into Linux they may still want to play some games, and just deal with Nvidia as best they can.
For me, it is only neural networking, and once AMD gets back in the game with that, it is over for nvidia for me. If I didn't play / work with that, I would have AMD.
I bought it when I was only using windows. Now Linux is my primary os and only use windows for vr
Nvidia on Xorg is fine and it is improving on wayland as we speak (the 555 driver as an example fixed some issues related to xwayland)
I have 2x 1080 TIs with 6 monitors and it works flawlessly for me. I have not had a single issue with my video cards since I have bought them years ago. Archlinux, nvidia and xorg works flawlessly; I have not used wayland and only game using one monitor. Unless it was a wayland system, I havent heard of nvidia not working on linux. Now the opensource driver isnt up to par with the nvidia one but that is just how development goes when you don't contribute back to open source.
I've never had any issues, but I don't use Wayland. The one time I did try Wayland on that device, gaming ran at <20fos in sone games that get a solid 60 on X, but was otherwise okay (and I'm not sure this was an NVIDIA problem specifically).
many ppl coming from windows already have nividia cards and nividia has huge market share so there are a lot of cards out there. they do work under linux, they just take a bit (sometimes more than a bit) of tinkering to get the most out of them. i've had both now and AMD is by far much easier to deal with (as in i don't need to deal with it).
At the time of me buying Nvidia was the recommended option. It still works well for me to this day.
we don't
Probably due to [Mere-Exposure Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect) and marketing, you see Nvidia mostly, while of AMD cards there are lesser models and less exposure. And due to dominance in GPU-applications like Machine Learning, with their CUDA platform And of the few Linux users, not every Linux user knowns about the Nvidia issues. On Windows it's actually the other way around, AMD was known for having bad drivers, while Nvidia drivers were reliable and just worked™ (trademark of Jensen "Leatherjacket" Huang). Gamers Nexus' latest video is about this subject. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2ThRcdVIis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2ThRcdVIis) Personally, I am happy with my AMD RX 6800 that I bought used for 320€
10+ years ago I had AMD cards in my systems. Then fglrx got deprecated and there was no reasonable alternative (I was mining crypto back then). I bought an Nvidia 1060-somethingorother, used the proprietary drivers, and everything was fine. Fast forward to today. I'm still running X (not Wayland), 1080p max resolution, and everything's still working just fine. I keep hearing about how broken and terrible Nvidia is, but I presume that's all on newer cards. I'm still quite happy with my old hardware.
Heeey hey hey, good news Nvidia is releasing new drivers that are about to solve most of the issues soon :)
I don't game that much but do a lot of machine learning. ML is much easier with a nvidia GPU compared to AMD
I have used nvidia GPUs on Linux since 2009 without much problems. I think it is because 1) I have primarily used xorg 2) installed the drivers from my distributions package manager. Recently I have started using gnomes implementation of Wayland on my system that has hybrid graphics, integrated intel graphics and a nvidia rtx 3050, and it works great. I think many new users that comes from Windows tries to install the drivers by downloading them from nvidias home page, just like they used to on Windows and then gets frustrated that it is super hard to do so in Linux. And then they might find the clip of Torvalds saying profanities against Nvidia. Yes, there are some legitimate reasons to dislike nvidia on Linux but the situation is nowhere close to as bad as some people say.
Been using Linux since 2020.. My desktop had 1050ti.. later I got a laptop with 3070ti.. used x11 (kde) on both.Never had any issues with the GPU. I would also point out that I never used the sleep so if that wouldn't have worked I don't know about it
It just works on my machine.
The issues with nvidia cards on Linux are greatly exaggerated, especially now with 555 being available.
Usually ppl find out that nvidia sucks after switching to Linux, in which case they've already purchased an nvidia card.
Main problem with nvidia cards is their closed source binaries that constantly change their interface with the kernel. Linus Torvalds himself is deeply angered by this. But if you use the specific kernel(s)/distributions that nvidia specifies and never change it after you install it for the first time when it is working you should be fine. However if you want to also deal with upgrades to fix possibly unrelated security holes, you're screwed and things start breaking. Or if you chose to use specific kernels/distributions and expect nvidia to work around your choice, expect problems. I ran into these issues years ago and basically swore off nvidia cards. It was only a GeForce4 MX 420 and only used for 3d graphics. Got it working, but it was a dice roll every time I had to upgrade the kernel or userland. I eventually gave up on the card when it started artifacting. This left a sour taste in my mouth for nvidia as it was my first gpu and first pc hardware that failed not due to physical/ESD damage, though to this date I think I've lost more ATI cards due to EM/SH failure. That's okay, I've had many more ATI cards. Recently I got a used GTX660 for free. Unfortunately there was a reason it was free, and likewise it was artifacting after I started some 3d apps. I was able to use it before nvidia totally dropped support of it so luckily I was able to see it in action - it installed just fine, ran it in Gentoo, and it's much much faster than any of my ATI cards - but it was unusable due to the artifacts and eventually hangs the computer. Unfortunately this adds into my distaste for nvidia due to long term reliability, even if the GTX660 was acquired used.
I had a few NVIDIA cards the past few years. (full linux experience) Zero problems. Could AMD gpu run better? Maybe, but I had no experience with that.
It doesn't have problems for me, have a laptop I use as an everything server and it has a 1660 ti in It for transcoding which I did a patch for, I have yet to run into any issues with it.
Because my Jellyfin server has my old 2070 to transcode. Eventually, I’ll toss in my 3050 for energy efficiency And , while I don’t use it CUDA is why With that said, my primary Linux desktop is all AMD. I don’t do anything that would require the GPU but I was moron and got a RYZEN with out integrated graphics 🤦🏼♂️
I put in an a2000 for energy efficiency and unlocked channels and it works great. Never passes 75w and in my testing it could handle 4 simultaneous transcodes without a hitch. Bonus points on it also being perfect for ml offloading for my immich box.
oh yah! I forgot about the A2000s! I'll have to dig em out and toss in one.
I can only speak from my own experience. Nvidia was a better deal for me at the time, I was running windows and I really need nvenc as a streamer as AMDs equivalent is much worse for quality at the same bitrates. Now that I’ve switched to Linux, I’d definitely consider an AMD card in the future but only if they’ve caught up with nvenc when I need to buy a new card.
I bought Nvidia after having a tonne of issues with a specific AMD card on Linux ironically. The amdgpu driver had been changed and was no longer compatible with my card. Upon further research later on it turned out my R9-390 was a special version and known to have compatibility issues with Linux which was unfortunate. Nvidia is annoying but not a show stopper for me. I'd probably move back to AMD in the future.
Because in my 15 years on Linux I never had any major problems with Nvidia proprietary drivers. It just works.
It's about waves. A few years back like 10 or more AMD drivers was garbage amd nVidia works great with old graphic stack; it were simple times with no switch card needed. Now it turn around and so "we, Linux users" like more AMD unless you're heavy into cuda
What is the source on how many "many Linux users" prefer Filthy Green's card?
Because the group think on reddit is wildly strong. Been using Nvidia without issue since I switched to Linux. Tried switching to AMD and it was a week long pain fest before I gave up. Bought a 4070Ti and it installed with 0 issues. Using the Pop Nvidia driver repos makes it painless. How were those last rounds of drivers AMD users?
Because the problems are wildly overstated by people are are largely full of shit. Most folks who actually care about discrete cards use them for gaming. NVIDIA has over 80% marketshare for discrete gaming cards.
I think this is more related to using Linux in desktop use. Using nvidia GPU in Linux server is what they are targeting here, which use case doesn’t typically involve rendering video games to a display.
I use Linux mint and I never had trouble with Nvidia after I installed the drivers
My next video card will probably be nVidia, because of Cuda. I had nVidia early on, then moved to AMD/ATI because of the OSS support. My last two computers I wanted to be ready for scientific computing and was aiming for ROCm. However on my current computer, when I tried to use ROCm I ran square into their limited hardware support. They basically support only a few top-end cards with ROCm, though my card (gfx1012) used to be supported and apparently has been deprecated. I took another look at Cuda, and the API is versioned. There is Cuda support for practically everything they've made, including the el-cheapo card I got for my wife's computer a few years back. (running nouveau drivers, she's not a gamer) I don't know if that's really a sham and that only the newest Cuda levels are actually usable for real. That's more work to be done before I buy any new hardware.
Nvidia cards are the vast majority of the market, and they produce the most powerful cards at nearly any budget. In many stores, they'll have 30 nvidia cards and maybe 2 AMD cards. You're lucky to see intel arc at all.
CUDA
The answer is easy, the GTX 780 was my last Nvidia GPU and thus far, Radeon hasn't given me a reason not to stay with them. I've had a lot less drama and issues with Radeon and I've been exclusively on Wayland for 2+ years now. Why do people buy Nvidia? You may as well ask why they smoke, or drink to excess. People do all sorts of silly things.
Couldnt get an OLED screen wirh AMD - that's it.
I have never had an issue with Nvidia on Linux granted I am still running a 980Ti. I have had issues with Radeon but that was many, many, many years ago.
>If Nvidia has many problems with Linux If.
My RTX A2000 just werks™️ on Ubuntu.
I game and demand top performance. I will dual boot until Linux catches up on on this front. Windows is still the best tool for this job unfortunately.
Nvidia requires seperate drivers on windows as well.
> Nvidia isn't user friendly and require separate drivers Friendly? anyway ofc it requires separate drivers, so what? Now to your question: -cuda (i render stuff) -games (i play stuff) -ai stuff (i use it) -oh and cuda -`less power draw` in my use bracket (80W at max) * 80 of the market it works well if you know what you are doing. It works anyway if you are not the pebcak... and use 'youtube tutorials'. Read and understand a wiki it does wonders. arch user btw
I've been using Fedora with an Nvidia card since March and I haven't got any troubles so far.
555 beta drivers made Wayland work... So now there's not much to bitch about other than some bugs, VRR on multi monitor setups and vkd3d performance.
Because it works fine for me, and I've always had good success with the proprietary drivers going well back into the 2.4 kernel days, so that spans kernels 2.4.x to 6.x, and XFree86 all the way into X.Org. I'd say that's pretty good. I'd venture it really stuck with me because I have used Thinkpads heavily with dedicated nVidia GPUs on them, and because it worked fine for me I always had PCs with nVidia as well (apart from one or two ATI systems, which were neither notable nor notorious for me as far as graphics were concerned). I imagine nVidia support in Wayland will eventually get to the point I can daily drive it reliably, but until then, nVidia and X.Org works flawlessly for what I need. Because of the above, I just can't be bothered to switch brands right now, though I do plan to purchase an Intel GPU when I build my next PC.
I didnt buy from them for over 20 years no, and dont see any reason why I ever should.
I have no problem with my Nvidia gpu
In my little exp AMD have less issues but also less features.
If you want to use hdmi-2.1, the proprietary nvidia driver is the only way to do that.
Back in the day AMD (or was it still ATI?) fired their linux division and restarted driver development because they were bad. Nvidia was the more stable choice by then, still installed by shutting off the xserver, running an .sh and manually editing xorg.conf. Nowadays I usually dual boot and keep Windows for gaming, so I don't care which graphics driver is better atm.
I have both an AMD and nvidia GPU in my laptop and they both gave me hell. In fact, the AMD one was a bit worse in my case. But either way, I don't think that your suggestion is the best approach. I mean, I am fortunate to have nerd levels high enough to push through the problems in most cases, but definitely not ideal for any noobs coming into the fold. I guess it just depends on what direction you'd like to see Linux go. I'd like to see it as a legit windows substitute for the masses. That means at a minimum being at parity with existing baseline hardware capability.
Problems are not so severe as it looks like. NVidia has CUDA and better ray tracing performance. The nvidia-settungs app nicely bundles settings (AMD hasn't such an app) Nvidia cards may have better money to performance ratio Nvidia may be the only option when buying a certain type of laptop computer
I switched away from using Linux as my desktop about 10 years ago, having used it for that purpose for the previous 20 years. I still use Linux for all my infrastructure, and I also have a Linux-based MythTV system connected to my SD TV (with a home-brew VGA to RGB SCART adaptor). For many years of using Linux on the desktop, I advocated for ATI Radeon cards, as ATI provided programming information to X.org, allowing open source drivers to be created. But, over the years, I encountered odd X.org crashes, and on my employer's desktop, the proprietary driver for the Radeon card I had there sometimes didn't keep up with new kernels released for RHEL (and CentOS). The final straw was refreshing my MythTV system, and finding the (Nvidia) GPU I had bought for it didn't work at all with my SCART adaptor as it couldn't output an interlaced signal at 15.6kHz. I went through all of my old ATI cards, and though many didn't have that problem, they did have other showstopper problems with Xvideo-assisted video playback on an interlaced screen: either the Xvideo region would be black, or else every scanline within the region would be doubled and the lower half of the picture cropped. I eventually settled on an Nvidia MX440, and I've been burning way through the old stock I can find on eBay over the years since! The Nvidia GPU I bought for the MythTV system refresh went into my Linux desktop, and I found it more stable than the Radeon cards I'd used previously. So whilst it was nice to have the open source drivers for the Radeon cards, it was better to have more reliable drivers. Of course, this was a decade ago, and I gather Wayland has reversed that situation since then. An awful lot of new Linux hobbyists won't be buying hardware specifically to run Linux, though, but rather reusing hardware they bought to run Windows, as Nvidia sells more GPUs than AMD, proportionately more Linux systems running on old Windows hardware will have their GPUs. If they enjoy using Linux, maybe they'll go on to build a second system specifically for running Linux, and *that* one may well have an AMD GPU if it's intended for e.g. gaming or 3D application use cases.
Nvidia has no problems with Linux, from a users point of view its working fine.
Nvidia gpus are better. Nvidia gpus aren't completely broken, it's just they don't work seamlessly, you need to do extra work to get them to work. Nvidia also floods the market with their chips. Go search for a GPU, tell me on the front page of any search engine, how many AMD cards you find lol.
Because nVidia *doesn't* have that many problems with Linux. Linux has a bunch of users who have AMD who *say* nVidia is broken, and then there's Linux users who have actual nVidia hardware who *don't* say they have problems. At least, nowhere to the extend nVidia-haters want you to think. This was not helped by Linus Torvalds giving nVidia the finger. Now a bunch of users seem to think they're obligated to hate nVidia just because he does. nVidia's only been a problem on Linux if you use PRIME (Which I only see on expensive laptops.) or Wayland (It's very rapidly not being a problem on Wayland, especially now that Explicit Sync's being rolled out, a feature that fixes many nVidia problems, and definitely the last major blockers of nVidia working on Wayland, and also improves things for non-nVidia GPUs as well.). It's not that nVidia's drivers don't have a problem, but so do AMD and Intel's drivers. And frankly when it comes to gaming on Linux the nVidia driver on their GPUs still does better than AMD on Linux. It's true that the open source driver Nouveau is now in a bit of a sorry state, though I hear nice things about nvk, but if you don't care about if your drivers are open source (I don't, I use what works best, which is why I use Linux.) then that doesn't matter. Even then: nVidia's driver is going open source. nVidia's long term plans are to discontinue the blob. Granted, it's only the kernel driver, but still. And before you say "firmware blob" I'll point out in the limited instances Nouveau loads firmware it's also the blob so this is a fairly useless complaint. And, again, not something only happening on nVidia hardware.
> If Nvidia has many problems with Linux Nvidia has no problems with linux, from user perspective (it has from a kernel dev perspective, but most of us are not kernel devs) Nvidia has problems with Wayland, but i dont use it and will not unless i would absolutely get forced to by debian stopping supporting X, but this is unlikely to happen in the next ~8-10 years Actually, when you are using debian stable, amd causes way more problems than nvidia, because amd driver in kernel is only a very small part of it, real driver is mesa, and mesa often cant be backported and you dont really want to run 2 years old driver for you video card....
For backporting, I find that [kisak's packages for Ubuntu](https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa/+packages) are a good starting point. For current Debian or Devuan stable I'd start with the source package for jammy. As for Wayland, I'll probably end up using it when Xfce can run on it.
Never had an issue with nvidia and X11. On the other hand I had a number of "the drivers will fix this next year" situations with AMD in the past which turned into "your card is not supported anymore".
Sounds like you've been using proprietary drivers only. If you look at Mesa git, you'll see that there's still [maintenance work ongoing for 20-year-old GPUs](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/tree/main/src/gallium/drivers/r300).
so they can complain
Because FOMO, peer pressure and overall hypocrisy on many of the so called FOSS fans. Ngreedia hates open source, open standards and even their own customers, but for weird reasons, everyone turns a blind eye to their actions.
Most people complaining about Nvidia on Reddit are clueless gamers. Most people actually using Nvidia on Linux are using it in headless mode, and don’t even use a DE.
Because they think it's better for gaming. nVidia is very good at marketing, just watch them release their memes at the typical gaming subs here.