I've always been a linux fan, bought my first copy in the 90s (before I had decent internet) and have used it ever since. Howver I'm also a PC gamer, so my stance was always "linux at work, windows at play/home" and its not until the release of the steam deck and Proton that I finally think that I can switch out windows for good. Its that good. And theres enough good games in the market that even if one I want doesn't work, I can just go find another game that does.
How is the current Nvidia driver situation on Linux? I wanted to give it a shot on my gaming PC for a long time now but was deterred by the various driver horror stories…
tbh it’s overblown. I have been holding off on wayland for this and various other reasons, but gaming on x11 with nvidia proprietary drivers is fine. The only difficulties I’ve ever run into is installing/updating the package using a distro-specific method. I’ve never hit a driver bug.
I recently switched to Linux for my daily driver. I picked Nobara. It installed, detected my card, and installed drivers. Pretty straightforward. That said, performance isn’t the same. I have just been playing Elden Ring and I am getting the fps, but there’s some stutter and screen tearing even with VRR active. Also, ray tracing isn’t a default, you need to add some stuff to your Steam launch.
Overall if you are looking to switch, get a new drive and start Linux on that. Keep your old Windows setup. At least that worked for me. Now I only boot Windows to mod Skyrim since I haven’t gotten that ironed out in Linux.
I’m currently using pop os with an etc 3070, and I haven’t noticed any major issues. I had some weird glitches on fedora because they use the open source driver by default, but using the proprietary Nvidia driver is totally usable. I even got ray tracing working on cyberpunk 2077
I’ve been using Linux full time on my desktop since 2019 and while I don’t think I’ll buy nvidia again, the experience in the meanwhile has been fine. The things I can do with my computer are much more limited, especially when it comes to Wayland. But assuming you’re just using your computer like a normal person you can stick to Xorg and basically have a totally normal computer experience.
Personally, one of the worst parts about nvidia proprietary drivers with Wayland is that I cannot use the night light feature in Gnome, which makes my display unreasonably uncomfortable during night time usage. When will nvidia provide the necessary support for the thing that makes it work? Who knows.
Ancient computer and nvidia card here. Not sure what Gnome's nightlight is ultimately based on, but you might try Redshift or f.lux which - I assume - do pretty much the same thing.
I've used both and am currently using Redshift. f.lux stopped working for me a few years ago and I haven't bothered trying to find out if that was a fluke and whether it will work again now. Redshift uses geolocation by default, but that can be turned off.
Not great for my use case but your mileage may vary I need very high res with 240hz which is only in beta drivers atm so it’s very difficult to find a distro I can use without messing about
I’m a Plasma on Wayland enjoyer, running a 1080ti, and pretty much every bug I’ve encountered since I’ve started using Linux has been resolved. There’s probably some stuff I don’t know about, purely because it doesn’t affect me, but it’s been smooth sailing here
For gaming? I haven't really run into any issues. If you're trying to virtualize your GPU for VMs and stuff like that, Nvidia is a lot more locked down. I use the proprietary drivers - the open source ones don't seem to perform as well. Most Distributions will just give you a prompt where you select which drivers you would prefer to use.
Currently, PCI passthrough works for dual-graphic cards only. However, there is a workaround for passing a single graphic card. The problem with this approach is that you have to deattach the graphics card from the host and use ssh to control the host from the guest.
When you start the virtual machine, all your GUI apps will be force terminated. However, as a workaround, you can use Xpra to detach to another Display before starting the virtual machine and reattach the Apps to display after shutting down the virtual machine.
If you have NVIDIA GPU, you may need to dump your GPU's vBIOS using nvflashAUR and patch it using vBIOS Patcher.
NVIDIA vGPU
By default, NVIDIA disabled the vGPU for consumer series (if you own an enterprise card go ahead). However, you can unlock vGPU for your consumer card.
You will also need a vGPU license, though there are some workarounds.
Follow this guide to manually setup a Windows 10 guest with NVIDIA vGPU.
Once I got my virtualization settings set up correctly in UEFI, and KVM was my hypervisor instead of QEMU TCG, my performance did seem pretty good. Maybe it's just working correctly without having to follow these steps?
Looks like that wiki page is out of date, you no longer need to dump your bios and patch it. I’ve never really found a need to control the host when running a VM, but SSH is a decent option if you only plan to use terminal apps.
Have you set up a VM with KVM and it’s working? There shouldn’t be much else to do, just install your gpu drivers and play some games, or run your windows application :)
people always complain about nvidia drivers on linux, but personally my experience has never required anything more than sudo apt install nvidia-driver
It works fine on a desktop with a single GPU mostly. Though I have had issues with multi monitor setup at work with xfce and xorg. I actually had a better experience with gnome and wayland, in terms of multi monitor support.
That said, all my own non work computers I use AMD/intel these days though. It just works now. I did have a bad experience years ago with an nvidia optimus laptop, where I couldn’t use the displayport without permanently enabling the nvidia GPU, killing battery life.
Arch is similarly this easy. I think where I usually see the most people complaining is when a new shiny version of the driver has come out and they try to update manually, breaking system packages and borking their system.
I'm not saying I have personally done this before. Nope. Not saying that at all...
Returning Arch user (absent since 2008/9) here, using Plasma Wayland. Overall a positive experience but there’s lots of little finicky things to setup, and I haven’t tried using linux-zen like in my EndeavorOS work laptop, I imagine that’s a bit more finicky with DKMS.
Nothing out of the ordinary for Arch thus far though, just manual configuration.
💯 I use Linux as my daily driver and don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. It’s come such a long way! Still not perfect but it’s really incredible
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