this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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State of the Nvidia open source driver in late 2023? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by wim@lemmy.sdf.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Hi all,

I'm in the market for a new big desktop replacement gaming laptop, and looking at the market there are almost exclusively Nvidia powered.

I was wondering about the state of their new open-source driver. Can I run a plain vanilla kernel with only open source / upstream packages and drivers and expect to get a good experience? How is battery life, performance? Does DRI Prime and Vulkan based GPU selection "just work"?

The only alternative new for my market is a device with an Intel Arc A730M, which I currently think is going to be the one I end up buying.

Edit 19/11: Thanks for all the feedback everyone! Since the reactions were quite mixed - "it works perfectly for me" vs "it's a unmaintainable mess that breaks all the time", I'm going to err on the side of caution and look elsewhere. I found a used laptop with an AMD Radeon RX 6700M, which I'm going to check out the coming days. If not, I've also found Alienware sells their m16 laptop with an RX 7600M XT, which might be a good buy for me (I currently still rock an Alienware 17R1 from 2013 with an MXM card from a decomissioned industrial computer in it).

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[–] wim@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's what I got from my past experiences as well, but I haven't owned anything Nvidia since the Pascal (GTX 10x0) era so I wanted to check if anything got better with their open source efforts.

[–] interceder270@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As someone with an Nvidia GPU (3060 mobile) with no issues, this is mostly FUD from AMD fanboys.

Experience > theory, everytime. Especially the theory of strangers on internet forums. :)

[–] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I wish it had just been theory, I wouldn't blatantly say something like my original comment if it weren't based off experience. I've written numerous comments on my experience with Nvidia + Linux [+ Wayland] - such as this comment, primarily the the second, third, and fourth paragraphs. Sadly I don't think its possible to "relative" link direct comments, so I've just linked my instance instead.

Since you mentioned it's a mobile GPU, I'm not sure if perhaps you have also have an internal GPU that is drawing your regular desktop. My friend doesn't have nearly the same amount of issues that I have with Wayland, because he's able to drive his desktop with his iGPU and does GPU passthrough to play games through a Windows VM - the 5600X that I have doesn't include integrated graphics so this was not possible for me.

Either way, if it works for you then fantastic. It certainly didn't work for me, and definitely not for a lack of trying.