Linux

The context seems to be missing.

Not an nvidia dev, but so far all my cards been nvidia, went over a quite a few of them, both laptop and desktops. In my experience they just work once you install proprietary drivers and the only type of a problem is when ubuntu silently decides to upgrade it behind your back - in this case you need to restart the machine so kernel modules match the drivers.

first thing i faced while distrohopping before i settle with fedora, is the instability of nvidia on linux.

it was short path to decision to spare myself of waiting for driver fixes, googling for driver statuses, waiting, posting questions, messing around, switching this and that in hope for better stability, getting frustrated in the end because wherever i search for fixes, there were posts about same problems with same subject: nvidia.

stable system throughout distro/kernel/driver/system updates is hugely more valuable than having GTX Ti 90000 inside my system and it was a very short bye bye.

since i ditched nvidia card and went for amd one, my system just works, it's been years, I've never looked back and very honestly, i couldn't care less about never ending stubborn struggle with nvidia.

I upgraded to a 6700xt from my 1660 and AMD has absolutely no problems in my system. It's amazing.

"Works on my machine..." Classic dev response, lol.

This reminds me of the nightmare of those laptops with intel and nvidia gpu so you could switch to nvidia if you wanted to game. And what a nightmare it was to even get the nvidia gpu working in linux.

When I'm buying new hardware I'll make sure never to buy nvidia again. However sometimes I am gifted things and it would be rude to refuse to accept.

On the Radeon camp, it's just "apt dist-upgrade; systemctl reboot"

Done.

The only time I had issues with the open source AMD drivers was when I was doing GPU pass through to play Elite: Dangerous, the drivers really didn't like the state Windows left the card in when it was time to reattach it to Linux.

I have an Nvidia 3080 TI, and I want to sell it to buy an AMD equivalent. Fuck Nvidia indeed.

services.xserver.videoDrivers = ["nvidia"]; go brrr

Same. Thankfully I found that pop!_os works beautifully out of the box and serves my purpose. But I’m done with nvidia. Once my 3090 lives till EOL I’m getting whatever XTX model AMD has

Fuck Nvidia. Never again.

Every once in a while, a new snapshot gets released for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and mailing list gets flooded with "nvidia PC no longer boots" messages. Meanwhile Radeon users can't get certain positive changes in the distro because nvidia users get no-video'd from it.

Sauce?

Team red ftw

This exact same thing happened on my Ubuntu desktop. I had to restart into safe mode, dpkg configure -a. Dunno what dumb ass thought having your screen go black and not respond to any input was acceptable during an update

I use Linux at home but as an IT technician have experience with Nvidia in the Windows world. And it was pretty terrible there too.

You have to create an Nvidia account just to get the latest driver (🤦‍♀️) and despite its supposed prowess Photoshop struggled. Solidworks (CAD Software) also had issues with Nvidia and would only work with specific driver versions.

Overall a real pain.

I would only recommend AMD especially on Linux as they say least provide open source drivers. Plus their CPU's are actually very good. I've seen some ancient pcs running Windows 10 on AMD CPU's.

NVidia just needs to open source their drivers so it can be integrated into the kernel, like all other drivers. Then the kernel team can help maintain them, and users won't have to worry about shit like this

On Arch, upgrading is pretty simple. The only extra step is you need a hook to run mkinitcpio, but that script is on the wiki and you never need to touch it again once set up. From that point onward you just upgrade the driver via pacman.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not like the fact NVIDIA’s drivers aren’t open source and their linux offerings aren’t the greatest, but your issue appears to be due to the way your distro handles the driver.

My last nvidia card (a 1050) had some weird non-obvious (likely hardware) issue that caused it to utterly lose its mind when faced with certain OpenGL shaders, but only when running the proprietary driver. It would throw bands of static on the screen or randomly drop the signal to the monitor. This persisted through several changes of kernel and driver version. It was solid under nouveau, but the performance suffered such that I noticed a lag even for just normal desktop use. In the end, I replaced it with an AMD card rather than attempt to troubleshoot it any further. My previous nvidia cards were solid, though.

I've never had a problem with the Nvidia driver in Arch. I'm convinced more often than not it's your distros fault it's not working right

I'm still getting the hard lock issue with driver 535 and a laptop running Arch. I've did a quick searches for issues and lots of different complaints in the results. I've been waiting for nvidia to put out these fires. Whatever they are. Still waiting since the 535 release...

I have an old Nvidia-Intel setup in my laptop, and dealing with that Nvidia driver is kinda of a hassle. Mostly it works fine thanks to mhwd (Manjaro's driver installation script), but damn, every time I reinstall the OS, it takes several hours for me to figure out what's wrong. Luckily I don't reinstall it too often, maybe every 5 years.

Before this I had AMD, and it always worked like a charm. And I've heard Intel's drivers are working well too.

Personally, I'm planning to go for AMD next time.

This is why I haven't switched to Linux yet. I have a gaming laptop and a desktop pc is not an option at the moment.