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.
Genuinely never have issues with Nvidia cards or drivers. Only thing that bugs me is that Nighlight in Gnome doesn't work. Other than that, not a single problem.
This is not accurate at all. It always works using Ubuntu’s GUI and you don’t have to reboot or anything. Only issues I had was that you have to reinstall those drivers each time you upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu
I have upgraded from driver 525 to 535 on 3 different systems (work PC/laptop and personal PC). Every single time the screen would go black and I had to force reboot.
This is absolutely accurate, at least for some people I guess.
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.
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.
Nvidia is a plague. They purposefully make the experience worse in any way possible if you don’t buy Nvidia products. Meanwhile AMD makes their drivers open source and promote open source software.
The outrage after Starfield announced they would support FSR and didn’t comment about DLSS was frustrating. FSR works on all hardware, while DLSS only works if you buy Nvidia products. Most people I saw were complaining about AMD being an issue though…
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
Wanna change? I have amd 7900xtx, and that shit awesome video card with not working opensource drivers just awesome! I’m sure you will have fun with it.
If your laptop is on Nvidia then it might be a problem, just stay away from that brand going forward, and from online games with bad anticheats, and you’re golden to go full Linux.
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…
People there just blindly hate nvidia and praise amd. And when I tried once tell the fact, that amd opensource drivers suck - I got a lot of minuses at my comment. Oh well, anyway, I really hope, that all that people will buy amd card one day and suffer as I did. I doubt that will change their opinion, cause they will still hate just_working nvidia drivers, cause “oh no, they not support VRR on my experimental wayland DE”. They focking dumb man, I tell ya. Anyway, I will try to sell my “awesome and opensource” amd 7900xtx and buy cheaper nvidia card. Just cause at cheaper nvidia card I could at least play fucking games and it will not crash my video driver every now and then.
Ditto. I use the Nvidia driver in Arch, and I forgot that I had it installed. No problems on this machine for more than 6y.
I have never heard of an installer running in the background causing weird delays requiring weird routines. Maybe it’s the way it’s packaged on their distro, perhaps? Like they’re shipping the installer in the package instead of the contents of the installer?
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.
This is what mine has. I was able to get it working with bumblebee on kali. Just switched to Debian 12, and I thought it would work after installing the non-free drivers, but nope. So guess I get to do some reading up on that now. Maybe look into bumblebee again.
I did get mine working eventually. Though that laptop died years ago. I did not get it to switch though so when I ran Linux it was always on the Nvidia GPU. But that wasn’t an issue for me.
I remember there being a name for this that made it easier to search for a solution. But for the life of me I cannot remember what it was.
Good luck on your quest and I hope you get it working.
omg i've been in this rabbit hole trying to get a friend's laptop working right for the last 2 weeks... I found the name of the thing you are talking about, where the dGPU HAS to talk to the integrated graphics to get to the laptop screen... and then promptly forgot it after getting so mad at such a stupid idea and when I went to google it again to find articles i had previously read I couldn't find it. :(
I finally got it working and feel like an idiot now. Secure boot was enabled. Thing is, I know I disabled it because you have to set a bios password in order to do so. But it somehow got re-enabled. Once I disabled secure boot again the Debian wiki instructions worked and it was pretty simple to do.
If you haven’t already, check for Nouveau support. And if your card is supported, you may need a kernel parameter. I needed nouveau.config=NvClkMode=15 (but be warned some parameters like that have some risk, like possibility of overheating, and may or may not be applicable or safe for your GPU).
For me, it has worked to just set environment variable DRI_PRIME=1 to use the Nvidia GPU for that specific application. (Maybe this is what Bumblebee does; I don’t know.)
In the future, though, I recommend avoiding Nvidia hardware.
I remember finding large text file in the win 10 base install that was just a list of game titles. I assumed it was so they could specifically choose which processes should always use the dGPU. I’m searching around now and can’t find any evidence it ever existed though. Anyone else remember seeing it? I feel like there was something about an inappropriate/porn game being included on the list.
As I mentioned in another comment, in my experience Nouveau does a much better job with multi-display and multi-GPU systems than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Unfortunately Nouveau’s actual hardware support is somewhat limited, so that is only relevant for a subset of Nvidia GPUs.
nouveau is hardly better than software rendering in most cases. heck, for pretty much every GPU from the last decade, it isn’t even able to adjust the GPU clock frequency (so it’s permanently stuck on the lowest frequency).
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