If I had a dollar for every time the Nvidia driver screwed me over I still couldn’t order anything with it because my graphics driver wouldn’t load.
You must log in or register to comment.
Nobara Linux has a dedicated driver manager to automate the process of managing NVIDIA drivers. I ran a 2060 for almost a year on Nobara with no issues thanks to the manager. I’m on AMD now and forevermore.
CachyOS with KDE did the trick for me.
This was me with my 4070. Eventually figured it out, but WOW does Nouveau suck until you get the drivers working. Still, loving Fedora 42 more than Windows 10, so I’m not going back.
To be fair, Nouveau did phenomenal work (reverse-engineering the driver) they shouldn’t have had to do if it wasn’t for Nvidias stubbornness. Especially for older cards it’s the way to go, and it really isn’t their fault the proprietary driver sucks so much. Since Nvidia now finally fixes their shit with the new driver (hopefully) it wouldn’t make sense to put too much work into supporting any RTX card anymore.
Not dissing the Nouveau folk for their work, I’m dissing Nvidia for being so shit as to force it.
@Dogiedog64 Yeah. There was a time when Nvidia did their damnedest to make Nouveau developers’ life a living hell.
AMD and Intel have almost the same performance on Linux. NVIDIA has not though. I had something 10-15% less fps with my RTX 3070, even with a gaming distro, latest NVIDIA drivers running and proton-GE.
I heard Intel GPUs has better Linux support than N*idia
why Intel over AMD? I thought AMD was the gold standard for Linux drivers. Did something change?
Can confirm anecdotally. Put Bazzite on my Intel laptop, works like a dream. Couldn’t install any distro - any - on my PC running a 4080. Had other friends test it and they couldn’t either. Switched to AMD, zero issues just like Intel. What do I need a superpowered card for when most of the games I play are from 2016 anyway lmao
Intel is almost flawless, I say as someone who uses an Intel A750. It does have a bug where putting load on the GPU causes a dramatic increase in latency for GPU compute tasks, but that’s mostly only important for VR. Flatscreen games work great.
I just got myself an AMD card and that’s all I need, fuck Nvidia
Hell yeah! 🤜🤛
Go blue or red, Never go green
RTX 3080 owner here. I get a black screen whenever I try to play a game after the desktop goes to sleep in Linux Mint. The only workaround is to restart the PC and play it before its screensaver comes on. The struggle is real.
Hey! I had the same issue on my RTX3070! What you need is to install the latest Nvidia driver. Those are not available by default and requires you to add the Ubuntu PPA, then you are able to switch with the driver manager gui
Doesn’t Mint offer those during the installation?
Try a distro with a recent kernel and install newest proprietary nvidia drivers
Like fedora, openSuse TW, bazzite or endeavourOS
install newest proprietary nvidia drivers
On newer cards, the open source drivers work pretty well as of version 555. The process for installing them is usually very similar to the proprietary drivers, but there’s often some flag you need to set to tell it to use the open source ones instead. For Fedora, the instructions are here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Kernel_Open (ignore the part about it only working for data center GPUs, as that’s no longer true)
sudo sh -c 'echo "%_with_kmod_nvidia_open 1" > /etc/rpm/macros.nvidia-kmod' sudo akmods --kernels $(uname -r) --rebuildIf you use Nvidia’s installer, it automatically uses the open source driver instead of the proprietary one if you have a new enough GPU (20 series or newer)
lol lucky you that you can resume from sleep
Aye, nvidia makes it so something doesn’t initialize when my computer wakes up… and something that I can’t find is turning on sleep mode in a way that I can’t figure out.
Sometimes Linux does get a groan or two out of me.
Have you considered giving your linux install a little caffeine?
I might recommend PopOs. It is also based on Ubuntu, is easy to use for beginners & tailored specifically for use with Nvidia. I’ve had great luck w/ my laptop that has Optimus.
Test it with a USB first. The link I provided is an alpha version of their latest release but you can also try the older, more stable version here.
PopOS has the best support for Nvidia. It’s basically plug-and-play. Mine is the RTX 3080.
PopOS is sadly far behind the latest Ubuntu release
Yes, but that’s because of the development for the cosmic desktop. After they finish it supposedly this summer it will follow Ubuntu again.
And that should matter to a gamer why?
Some people don’t JUST use their PC for gaming, other features also matter.
I’ve also had a lot of luck with Bazzite so far too.
Fedora, Bazzite, and CachyOS are all pretty good distros for Nvidia. Still wish I’d gotten AMD though
Friends don’t let friends mix Nvidia and Linux.
Meh, it’s way better as it used to be. Even using Wayland. Currently a breeze, really.
A KDE Breeze?
That also, because KDE Connect if fucking awesome.
Been experiencing random rendering glitches in Firefox since upgrading to 570.
Before that it was random video memory allocation faults after playing a game for some time.
And then there was the whole year where Wayland stopped working entirely after finally getting support.
But I guess you’re right, it’s definitely miles better than when I got the cursed thing 5 years ago.
Bro my Cinnamon desktop just broke. It refused to load anymore. Could not fix it until I popped in my old AMD card, then Cinnamon magically worked again.
I suspect the drivers shat the bed but I’m not 100% sure. Went ahead and bought a new AMD card anyway and it works like a dream now.
I can only say that I currently don’t have any issues. There are a lot or variables though, so as you’re saying, your milage may vary.
It is alot better, I keep hesitating on dropping the money for an equivalent amd card. I keep telling myself I’ll do vfio and try looking glass. Then I look into the config and shudder. I can deal with a restart a day.
endeavourOS with Nvidia since 1,5 years… First on x11, and before several months moved to Wayland. Never had an issue related to the GPU. I’m not sure if the other distros have really such big problems or it’s meme propaganda, that Linux isn’t ready?
EndeavourOS shipped with the driver, right? Distros that do so tend to have the fewest problems with it, so you dodged a bullet there. A lot of problems arise during its install process or updates due to inconsistent integration or simply Nvidias incompetence (the driver module suddenly missing or not properly loading on a new kernel, stuff like that).
I see, the OS installs it and I don’t have to do anything else after installation. I understand now what most people with Nvidia have to go through if they are forced to use a specific distro. I just assumed that most distros will handle that as well for the user.
Why I bought a steam deck even though I have a laptop that’s better (although a lot older) mainly because my laptop won’t work with Linux (yes including the latest drivers) because of the fucking Nvidia won’t work properly.
Although tbh I rather play games on my steam deck with potato quality just because it’s portable
What’s the deal with Linux and Nvidia? Do the official drivers suck, or is it people not wanting to use a closed source driver but not having good open source drivers? I might have access to a good gaming PC soon but it has an Nvidia card.
I use Nvidia on Linux for over a decade now, never had a problem. Using the official closed source drivers. I don’t know if AMD is better because I never tried it myself, but in my experience Nvidia is working as well as on Windows.
This is on desktop, I don’t know about laptops. My experience is also limited to gaming, maybe it’s bad for CUDA or something.
The current official Nvidia driver is known to cause problems during install, during system updates or basically whenever it feels like it (when using Wayland, after hibernation, on rainy days…). Even the most well maintained distros regularly struggle with it, ran into trouble on both Mint and OpenSuse myself in the past.
If you don’t have your distro already I’d suggest trying one that comes with the Nvidia driver preinstalled (they then also usually take care of all the small adjustments). Saves you some headache.
Those I can currently think off that ship the proprietary driver (in no particular order): ZorinOS, Pop!_OS, Nobara, Bazzite, EndeavourOS, TuxedoOS, SlimbookOS
The drivers have gotten a lot better over the last few years, and Nvidia even have an official open-source driver now, but there’s still issues with them. Wayland works very well now, but not perfectly (especially on GPUs with low VRAM).
If you’re on Linux and are buying a new GPU, stick to AMD. Their driver is part of the Linux kernel, it’s more stable, and it gets all the newest features first.
As a game developer I would suggest the opposite. Never had a report that came down to an Nvidia graphics card, however AMD will randomly introduce game breaking bugs in their Linux driver and leave it unfixed for years.
deleted by creator
I think you misread? I don’t get any bug reports from Nvidia users.
Responded to the wrong person my bad.
And now* nvidia launched Nova, instead of contributing to Nuveau for some reason. It’s like they want to take wind out of Nouveau.
What? Nova is a rewrite of Nouveau from scratch by Redhat devs to better support newer cards.
Oops, you’re right. I got confused with the three open source drivers available. Nvidia’s driver doesn’t have a good name. The point stands though.
Nvidia has helped the Nouveau devs by answering questions in the past, but they also have their own open source driver here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
NVK is pretty cool but it is still pretty new
It is now supported in Mesa
