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I mean, Nvidia drivers have been shitty on windows too as of late
I managed to get hibernate working on opensuse with an Nvidia card, so I guess I’m lucky as hell.
No you fucking didn’t.
I had to remember that I’m trans and furry and channel that energy during drive partitioning.
There are limits to a furrys power
Call me Icarus baby
No way I’m configuring that. It needs to position the same amount of space as your ram amount right?
I’ll just sleep or turn it off.
I made a dedicated hibernate partition on nvram, and gave it enough space for my cpu RAM and the DRAM, plus like ten percent. In the opensuse setup you give it a particular name, then you look up the right kernel config parameter and boom done.
This is even with the Nvidia drivers.
I was shocked too. I decided to that that after faffing around trying to get sleep working. 😄
Hilarious to see this after my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install booted to a black screen (with a cursor) and no TYY access after a 16 GB update. X_X lol.
Oh well. Been here before, thank God for BTRFS and Snapper integration! Probably just gotta freeze that Nvidia driver again for like a week. Blah.
When it works, I agree with some other posters here: It works fine. My only graphics issues have been “doesn’t boot into graphics environment and
Nvidia-smisays ‘We ain’t found shit.’” LOLOtherwise it’s a LOT better than it’s been. I haven’t had to go chasing down obscure issues.
Been there! Got that update borked as well, journalctl shows permission errors on /dev/nvidia*
Snapper’ed back as well, waiting for a proper update - bug already reported by others. Freezing driver update was actually problematic because it causes all sorts of dependency issues that end up hard to resolve. Nvidia made a real mess there.
Hey I really appreciate you updating me with that! Thank you. :)
It’s not always easy to know if it’s a “My machine” problem or a “They’ve gotta fix it” problem.
Thought it’s my machine, too. Got a 1060, that thing gets deprecated and requires its own drivers. Already had issues with that on TW, so expected that to be the problem.
But then checked the forums, and well…it’s not just you and me :)
am still using my GTX 1650 till it breaks
I have a 3090 that I will replace with an AMD card the second it makes financial sense for me.
I’m in the same boat. As soon as I can get comparable performance at a price I can afford, I’m jumping ship from team green.
Those AI slopping MFers just broke my shit just last week.
If you don’t have a video card, you don’t have (video) driver issues.
Serial terminal gang represent!
Am I the only one who has no problems with Nvidia drivers?
2-3 years ago when I tried Fedora (I think shortly before Fedora 41 released)? Yeah, after a few hours of figuring out how to get them installed I had serious screen artifact issues still, and ultimately ended up back on Windows.
Trying Bazzite a couple months ago with the drivers preinstalled and functional out of the box? No problems since then, games just work (except Crimson Desert for a month, but I didn’t actually care to play it so that was fine), and I can actually focus on learning Linux without stressing over whether I can play my games.
Yes it never worked right. Specially in all shitty laptops with a discrete nvidia card and how they all had different ways to be integrated. At least for personal laptops I only buy ones with simple integrated graphics, but was always a shitty situation with work laptops. It was particularly fun knowing that the hdmi port was only connected to the nvidia card so if I disabled the nvidia card on the bios basic shit like that wouldn’t work. Let’s not even mention how it was constantly crashing for sleep or when waking up.
No issues here either, I screwed up a driver update leaving Debian repos to actual Nvidia repos but other than that no issues
No.
Using Fedora - sometimes akmods fails to build the kernel module after a kernel update, but that’s fixed with a single command (
sudo akmods --rebuild --force) and a reboot. Besides that, it’s been rock solid.On OpenSUSE I had constantly problems. But I heard that they release Kernel updates faster and sometimes the NVidia driver isn’t ready yet for the new kernel.
It might have been another story with the old driver architecture…
Nvidia drivers have worked fine for me on Mint, Parrot, and Artix. The only downside is they are pretty bloated and want to be loaded early in the boot process, so it adds several seconds to the initramfs load.
I haven’t tried compiling the image without them, mostly because it’s only a few seconds on boot and I don’t enjoy repairing broken boot images.
There’s a lot of PTSD from linux users in the before-time.
Don’t get me started on trying to compile 3Com network drivers.
The funny thing is that for a long time nvidia was the GPU brand to get on Linux because ATI (now AMD) drivers were just as closed but sucked ass.
I remember specifically buying an Nvidia GPU in 2009 because their proprietary driver was awesome and could do multi monitors properly using their proprietary X11 extension called TwinView
I have an almost 20-year old laptop with an nvidia card as old as it is. I’m running Mint on it and never encountered any issues with it in particular. To be fair, using Mint also probably made it less of a headache as it sorted out the drivers automatically during setup.
Imo back in the days amd wasn’t any better
It was actually worse until they open sourced their drivers.
I’ve had a bastard of a time with Nvidia drivers in the past few weeks, though I’m honest enough to accept that a big chunk of that could well be a combination of user error, and that I have a fairly old 1060 GPU.
I’ve got a really old one, a 1060 or 1070 I forgot. Zero issues
But performance according to benchmarks is much worse than on windows.
In AMD case it is higher on Linux if you exclude RT
It’s been fairly good for me on bazzite with my Nvidia card. I have to set some launch options in Steam from time to time to make HDR work but otherwise I’m happy (I had Nvidia issues on a different machine using Ubuntu but switched to different drivers and things improved)
Yes. Don’t brag.
In all seriousness I haven’t used nvidia for ~ 6 years. Back then my issues on nvidia were periodic updates breaking, or with multi monitors. On amd ive never had a driver update break…ive also switched to a single very large 4k so that may also help.
Since I started using arch I’ve been fine. Ubuntu was rough though. Since Ubuntu and derivatives are mostly considered beginner friendly I can see how it might be a bigger issue. Maybe it is also a problem with older cards that don’t get as many updates.
Nope. Zero issues here on three different machines.
Drivers can be weird though and small differences can be all it needs to cause massive issues.
It depends on both the hardware and distro. I got a laptop RTX 3070 and depending on the distro I got different problems.
On Linux mint, running some games in full screen will freeze the main screen
On fedora KDE, you can have an incompatible kernel version getting installed as an update, borking the system.
On nix os KDE, blender doesn’t want to render anything after waking from sleep (may be a blender issue.)
Yeah on fedora or any other rolling distros you’ve got to look it up online if an Nvidia driver has been released before upgrading the kernel. I always forget to do that and I’m forced to touch grass for a few days until the driver gets released.
Personally that was a deal breaker for me. After a long day at work, coming back to chill out and do some blender only to find out your setup is booked and now you have to fix the system, it really gets on you.
Thankfully I had an old Linux mint partition I never cleaned up (Too lazy), so I could have continue, but the average user would just go “fuck Linux. Going back to windows”.
Yes I switched to bazzite on by gaming PC for that reason. Works really well and I can always play my games without that fear, or the annoyance of windows. I always recommend bazzite to new users for this reason.
Fedora works really well on my laptop tho
I’m not a big gamer (and factorio doesn’t have the full screen issue) so I still use mint, but I’m gradually switching to nixos. Works better… If you add the correct config for game scope and the rest (easily found on the wiki)
I’m still at least a year away from falling down the nixos rabbit hole, but I can hear it calling to me. Good luck tho
@RustyNova @MyNameIsRichard
>On nix os, blender doesn’t want to render anything after waking from sleep (may be a blender issue.)seems to be cuda issue. On my machine cuda sometimes refusing to work after sleep, requiring some ‘node restart’
Might be fixed by disabling modeset (nvidia-drm modeset=0), or by blocking display server from using nvidia drm node (if display output does not use nvidia)Meh. I actually like it because it reminds me to save the file.
Although nice domain name lol
I switched to Linux because the nvidia drivers on windows got so bad my GPU was crashing once every boot. On Linux I regularly have significantly worse performance (especially in VR) but its more stable. I’m fine with a lower fps rather than just getting kicked out of games when the driver crashes.
Would be nice if they worked on those performance issues, though.
I’m gaming on grandpa Debian using nVidia’s CUDA repository for driver updates and I’m sitting fat and happy. Ignore instructions to install kernel headers for your specific kernel and just use the
linux-headers-amd64meta-package and it will automatically install new headers when the kernel updates. DKMS will rebuild the nvidia module for the new kernel and now kernel and nvidia driver updates are now seamless. Performance is not noticeably different from when I was on Windows.The only improvement at this point would be kernel-level integration like AMD has so I don’t need to add a repository, but aside from that I honestly don’t see room for improvement.
No, they work just fine for me on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. They load and compile in updates and that’s all there is.
Lot’s of circlejerking online. I have no doubt that some people have issues while having an nvidia card, and I also have no doubt that in some cases the driver might be to blame.
But unless you fiddle things, go out of your way to “optimize things” by following some random posts or something like that, most common distros handles nvidia drivers properly. The same usual disclaimers applies though; being “bleeding edge” means you’ll cut yourself, and all that.
For people that just install a system (and I mean something well known to work, not “the latest craze you absolutely have to replace everything with”, it’s fine. They (nvidia) even ironed out most of wayland issues for a while now. There are still some minor lingering issues, but nothing most average users will notice.
Yeah, no… If the most basic stuff like controlling your fan speed is broken for literal years (utility needed root permissions, yet using su or sudo made it crash), that’s not some fault of users having too esoteric demands but pure and simple Nvidia idiocy.
Can you link us to the bug thread?
It’s been a few years but I can see if I can find the old links. I still remember that you got some “Display undefined error” then a crash when running sudo nvidia-settings.
Minor lingering issues like DP displays not consistently waking up after sleep without a hard power cycle, VRR and HDR being essentially unsupported, and basic driver functions like frame rate limits not working?
Your average users might notice some of that…
Running Debian 13 with a 3060ti with Nvidia drivers, 3 monitors mixed DP and HDMI, and as far as I can tell those all work just fine. Save for the VRR, I haven’t tested that at all.
Mixing DP and HDMI works, using DP only causes issues with resume from suspend.
This is my main problem with these “Nvidia is fine on Linux posts”. People have something work in their specific setup, and assume it works in all setups, and that just isn’t true.
I’m not assuming it works in all setups. If people only talk about things that don’t work though, it doesn’t help move people to Linux. I’ve got a feeling that like with much of anything, the problems seemingly are overblown because those who aren’t having problems don’t have a reason to say so.
As someone who tried moving to Linux on my main pc multiple times, fuck that. There’s nothing overblown here. Theres always some problem.
nah i used mint for years with nvidia, it got good at least a couple years ago. i still have a thinkpad with nvidia running ultramarine, and i haven’t thought about the drivers even once after installing.
on the dumber side of the fence, sister was complaining about nvidia drivers being shitty on winslop, now she switched to amd and the drivers are way shittier.
funny how it turned this way.
I had a problem on my work laptop with them about five years ago, but rolling back fixed it. Never on my personal machines.
Edit: TBF, I’ve never had a personal laptop with an nVidia card. I generally prefer to build my own desktops, though I do have a laptop. It has an AMD GPU, also with no problems.
Upgraded to an AMD card and suddenly Linux became perfectly reliable.
I had a 3060 and it wasn’t that Linux wasn’t reliable but it occasionally would receive an update that would require a video card driver update as well. I bought a 9070xt, sold the 3060, and haven’t had a single issue since.
Yeah, the nVidia shituation is much better than a decade+ ago, nowdays I just have to manually pause upgrades (of drivers, kernel, or both) for a few weeks one evey two years or so.
I need to buy me some AMD. And AMD/Intel needs to build some high end GPU (for consumers I mean).
I think we have recieved bad news on the Intel GPU front recently.
This is why I’m annoyed that AMD hasn’t released a high-end graphics card for 4 years. I don’t want to build a brand new gaming PC with a 4 year old GPU.
Still has an issue with HDMI speed since HDMI is a proprietary spec and they don’t allow 2.1 in open source drivers so it’s stuck on 2.0 speed. Displayport is very good though.
Same. Hopefully AMD still bothers making GPU with…is it 1% market share while Intel gave up entirely again? Dire.
Every fucking time. Last night I was having a bunch of crashes after normal use. And yep, it was related to the Nvidia driver…
I use AMD GPUs.
I’m yet to know what I’m missing out on since switching a decade ago. The grass has always been greener. Great performance; no hassles.
Do AMD GPUs have good Linux support?
I’m not even an AMD fanperson. But in the last 20 years it only made once sense for me to buy Nvidia with the offerings at hands, my budget and my needs. I will never get why they are THIS popular.
Y’all I would happily take all yalls nvidia GPUs.
(Slackware has made using nvidia drivers easy for so long now I’m surprised the other distros haven’t fucking figured it out.)
Every distro makes this easy. Every single one. Some have to enable a separate repo for all proprietary shit which is the limit of the challenge.
But kernel upgrades? That’s where I’ve broken mine and gave up
The problem is not “using the drivers”. It’s the driver quality.
Elaborate? Cause I can use the nvidia GPGPU stuff so much easier than amd and their fucked rocm (I want that to succeed so bad)
In addition to that other answer: they are bad at maintaining their userspace tools. The basic nvidia-setup program was at times so broken that you could only change stuff as root because using su or sudo crashed the app. Which is fun if your root account is deactivated by default… And they couldn’t be bothered to fix it for literally more than a year.
I still have a script in my files that was running in early boot to change the fan speed at boot because there was no other way to change configs once booted and logged in.
The compute part of Nvidia’s proprietary driver stack is fine. That is what they historically have been putting their resources and effort towards, since their big customers only care about compute.
The graphics part of the stack is where the problems are.
- Up until Wayland, they were bypassing the kernel’s standard GPU initialization path and using their X server implementation to do everything instead.
- As far as gaming goes, is is unable to utilize the graphics hardware as efficiently as on Windows. More time is spent stalling/blocking, as evidenced by lower power draw and performance.
- Their QA is awful. There was an issue with GTK 4 apps freezing when closed. They fixed it, and then the next driver release reintroduced it.
Their transparency and community involvement outside of the kernel mailing lists is also pretty poor. They read peoples’ bugs reports and feature requests on their forums, but they rarely acknowledge them or give status updates.
Ooh thank you for elaborating. I hope that the opening of their drivers would solve some of those issues. And we can finally have things working nicely
Maybe it’s because mine is old, but my NVIDIA card never interfered with running Mint.
Mint has worked fine with my 1060, 2060, and now 3060.
5070 checking in on Mint, runs fine.
4070 and mint on my laptop. No issues here.
4090 is OK, too.
Things currently stopping “YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP”
- Anti cheat
- Adobe
- Microsoft Office Suite
- Nvidia
- No availability of Linux PCs in physical stores
These but to a lesser degree
- AutoCAD
- Obscure research/academic/industrial software
- Music production software
Good summary.
I’ve been working a while and think the latter things combined with the unfamiliarity of MDM/IT management tools in Linux has stopped much wider adoption.
So many industries just MUST run a few key apps that were designed and battle tested in windows long ago, as in wet lab science, manufacturing, and medicine to name a few I’ve seen.
Also stability (sorry but it’s hard to beat a MacBook).
Music production software RIP. Not to mention the Lovecraftian horrors of the Linux audio stack. It’s gotten so much better with REAPER and there are many great VSTs but there’s still a long way to go.
It’s so frustrating that I can’t run office software. But why is adobe a problem?
