russjr08

Ah very nice, a 7800 XT should be a fantastic upgrade (assuming my understanding of AMD's GPU lineup is correct, I can hardly keep up with Nvidia's as a "software" guy)! I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that it gets there quickly for you, and that the swap goes smoothly.

Yeah it's absolutely ridiculous. The "stable" release is out in the extra-testing repo for Arch, and I just had an absolute nightmare trying to get it to work. Installed it, added the suggested nvidia-drm.modeset=1 nvidia-drm.fbdev=1 kernel parameters to systemd-boot, ensured all of the Nvidia kernel modules were present in initrd to do early KMS loading - tried to start a KDE Wayland session and the desktop ran no more than maybe 5 FPS and I wish I were exaggerating that. A very similar issue was reported on their forums but the error I'm getting from kwin_wayland_drm is slightly different.

Tried install GNOME, but its Wayland session wouldn't even launch at all. Loaded into its X11 session and it seemed to not be using accelerated graphics whatsoever.

Now of course, part of the blame goes to me for opting into the testing repo... but at the same time, I shouldn't have to go through those hoops just to potentially get a working Wayland desktop (and I suspect even if I had succeeded, the same issues will have still been present). As far as I understand, AMD/Intel's drivers are just part of mesa and are included in the kernel - no modifying your initrd, no worrying about DKMS, no trying to mess with .run files...

I have a Windows partition on one of my SSDs for the few occasions that I need to do something that can only be done from Windows, and I think I'm just going to use that till my GPU comes in. Funnily enough, Nvidia's drivers aren't even that great on Windows either - I still get a screen flicker issue whenever (I believe) the power state of the GPU changes, so for example playing a YouTube video, or even Steam popping a toast notification saying that a friend has launched some game. And plenty of my friends have tales of nightmares with trying to install and manage the Nvidia driver on Windows.

I would've never bought an Nvidia GPU in the first place if I had known how bad it was on Linux, and my current Nvidia GPU (a 2080) wasn't actually purchased by me, but handed down by a very gracious friend at the beginning of the year since times have been really tough for me. Thankfully this last month I was able to put in some extra hours to be able to set aside some money for a used 6700xt because if I have to deal with this any longer I'm going to lose my sanity.

I appreciate the heads up either way, thank you!

If you don't use any XWayland apps, yeah - this is still a major blocker unfortunately assuming they didn't make any significant changes between the beta from a couple of weeks ago and now.

No, thankfully that was resolved with this update.

I tried out the beta version of 545 last week, I swear it made the render issue with XWayland apps worse. Even if it's back to the 535 state, it still makes using Wayland on Nvidia very difficult unless every application you plan to use is Wayland native. It'll be a while before that's the case for me.

I plan to just pick up a 6700 XT next week. I'm tired of being a second class citizen in Nvidia's eyes.

That being said, I appreciate the devs themselves who've been working on improving what they can (there's a couple that I've even seen participating in the Freedesktop GitLab). I assume the lackluster Linux support comes from the management side of things. I may not like the company, but I obviously don't have disdain for every single person there.

Ah, there-in lies the good ole chicken & egg problem. The majority of people won't sign up until bigger people are on the platform, but bigger people won't sign up for the platform until the majority of people are on there.

I do wonder why billion dollar companies (or in the case of NASA, an organization that AFAIK is still funded directly by the government) can afford to do this.

I'd also argue that extremely rigorous testing is a bit more important in terms of life-or-death scenarios for the companies that you mentioned, rather than Mozilla - but hey, that could just be me.

I mean come on, your comparison might work for a company that can hold a candle to the ones you mentioned (ie, Google or Apple) but how large do you think Mozilla (who still has to take handouts from Google essentially) is? Even then, I'd still say it's probably a bad comparison given my second point.

I find the concept of NixOS to be incredibly cool, and in terms of immutable operating systems it would in theory be one that I'm really interested in!

But the last time I tried it, I found that I was constantly fighting the system, and the documentation is all over the place and confusing. There's things like "Oh hey use Flakes!" but then most of the documentation doesn't really cover Flakes because it's still considered experimental, yet it feels like the majority of the community uses it.

I also had software that would just randomly break, and when trying to track down the changes from Nixpkgs I couldn't find anything that would prompt why it broke. Which... seems counterproductive to one of the strong points of Nix.

One example I ran into, is OpenRazer - the service is no longer being exposed and was reported 7 months ago. I did my best to try to track down the changes that broke it, but I suspect it's possibly a lower level change outside of the OpenRazer package/module that caused it to break.

I get the impression that if I wanted to try to fix it, I'd have to take on the massive gauntlet of understanding how all of NixOS' internals work, and while yes someday I'd love to have a better understanding, right now I'm more focused on just making sure the things I'd like (or even need in some cases, like software for my job) just works.

What sort of things are you looking for?

Well, I know for a while Steam only officially supported Ubuntu, and on their developer page It still mentions that they only support Ubuntu, though I don't know if they've just forgotten to update the page:

Steam only officially supports Ubuntu running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or newer and SteamOS, but the Steam for Linux community is extremely resourceful and has managed to run Steam on a large variety of distros. Valve approves of these efforts but does not officially endorse or provide support for them.

Interesting, I will have a look at them - thanks!