i just upgraded to an AMD card yesterday because of the Nvidia driver nightmare lol
I use mint on two different machines with Nvidia GPUs. One is a several year old desktop with a 1080 and the other is a two year old Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia GPU in addition to the Intel one on the processor.
Now granted I don’t play a ton of games right now, and when I do they usually aren’t cutting edge, but I don’t recall many problems so far. I use NVENC for Jellyfin and editing videos more often, and that has been pretty smooth. The one issue I had was related to that though. Kdenlive (flatpak) updated and could no longer export videos because it was looking for a newer version of something my mint-supplied nvidia driver wasn’t yet updated to have.
Trying to install a newer driver manually was a whole damn thing though, so I rolled back the kdenlive flatpak to the one that worked.
It was a horror show a decade or two back when I first tried Linux. I feel like this meme is just too late or just old.
Yeah, I used a 1070 on arch for years without any issue, recently switched over to an Intel arc gpu and that gave me way more problems (admittedly most of it was my “fault” for being on an old mbr scheme, needing to enable rebar, and needing to switch from xorg to wayland… but that’s just what happens when a graphics card is so stable you don’t feel the need to reinstall your os or change anything major). I am not hired by Nvidia nor do I support their business practices when it comes to making development on Linux difficult or creating proprietary standards like cuda, just stating my personal experience with their drivers.
my only issue nowadays is stuttering on wayland.
installing it is actually pretty straightforward on ubuntu.
Probably should’ve been “installing and using nvidia drivers”.
eh, its not that bad nowadays if you arent doing anything fancy. could be better, could be worse.
ill still favor AMD on linux, but nvidia users can use linux now without that much friction. exception is maybe optimus laptops.
It’s definitely better than say a year ago, but it’s always a new small issue. Like suspend is not working, or shutting the monitor off crashes the graphics stack etc.
I really hope they get their shit together and build a solid wayland support at some (not too distant) time. But the amount of issues is small enough for me that I’ve switched to it.
they are building nvk. it seems, in typical fashion for them, they are letting the community do it. we are already using the open kernel driver and it works well, and the community is also working on reimplementing it properly.
seems like things will indeed fall into place in a not too distant time.
i’m also not having issues beyond the stutter just yet. in any case, looking forward to get my radeon back from the repair shop.
As a Linux noob I feel that lol… Currently on my Mint Laptop with an nvidia gpu (RTX 4060 Mobile version) and while most stuff worked out of the box, am running into several small annoyances:
- steam doesn’t launch (steamwebhelper doesn’t respond).
- Sleep mode just completely crashes the system once in a while.
- The GPU runs pretty warm, even if I don’t use anything / have the laptop closed.
- Tried to tinker around with the ‘nvidia-xconfig’ CLI in order to use a custom fan curve and it created a config file which completely stopped my desktop environment from even launching at startup… Somehow managed to recover the system through terminal shenanigans
To anyone thinking about switching to linux, do yourself a favor and do it on AMD hardware.
So true! Last week I did a fresh install of Mint with the recommended nvidia drivers, and only installed Brave, Steam, Discord, and Vampire Survivors on my 3080 PC… 15 FPS at best. Tried the open source nvidia drivers and, which stopped Steam from working (so weird). Re-installed steam and Vampire Survivors and still couldn’t get anything to work (even tried, and failed, to run a few other games). Boy it would be nice if nvidia put in more work to support Linux. 2025 will be the year for Team Red!
sudo apt install nvidia-driver
Congratulations, firefox is now crashing
I still cant sleep my computer with a 2070 Ti. I just shut it down and start it up every time, which is pretty shitty.
That happens with my windows machine so eh. See if your distro has a hibernate option.
Not trying to criticize you or anything, just genuinely asking - why is it so much worse to turn your computer off when you’re done with it than putting it to sleep?
Because it takes 15 minutes to boot.
Send help.
If your computer takes 15 minutes to boot…something is wrong. Even when I ran Windows on a non-SSD it didn’t take that long.
Oh I’m aware, I just have no idea what the hell it is and I’m putting off a reinstall.
You can change your bootloader output to verbose and it should give you an idea. Probably a startup process hanging for it’s maximum timeout or something.
I installed a Nvidia 3060 earlier this year. Ran the command, rebooted the system, everything works fine.
I installed it on silverblue earlier this year and it was almost fine except firefox would randomly crash all the time, which was frustrating. Also gaming is a whole mess with nvidia. I miss my AMD card
it’s the same as installing programs on your pc, the biggest issue would be that you have to use a cli because I dont know if you can install Nvidia drivers via gui
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How can it be a skill issue if you did nothing?
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All these Nvidia driver memes are why I haven’t fully switched to Linux with my main rig (which is used solely for gaming). Servers, fuck yeah boy, Linux all the way. Stable as fuck and super lightweight. But I don’t need those to render things in 3D at 60+ FPS.
I also never got Wi-Fi drivers working until Ubuntu first came out and I tried it.
That kinda shit makes it feel like a catch-22: some things don’t work on Linux because nobody is developing that thing for Linux, and they aren’t developing that thing for Linux because people who use that thing don’t use Linux (because it’s not there). Partially why I learned to code; sometimes I want something that doesn’t exist so I must create it. Unfortunately, I am not learned enough to make drivers/wrappers. 😔
I’ve had wireless working in linux since 2002. 802.11b was complex but quick. I was still running slackware back then.
Haven’t had an Nvidia issue for years
It was slower to adopt Wayland but that’s resolved
Longevity of AMD is better but that same issue exists on other Operating Systems
Meanwhile in reality installing Nvidia drivers is literally just a checkbox in a Drivers menu in system settings. Unless you are using Arch or something.
I recently finally moved to Linux (Mint). I have Nvidia GPU and yes, all I had to do was check the box and the drivers installed automatically. No problems so far.
I still have Windows 11 installed though (dualboot). I know there’s some compatibility problems with Linux that’s affecting me, but Linux is my main OS.
The memes are extremely outdated at this point. I’ve been rocking Linux with a 3070 for the last year and a half and have only seen minor issues and major improvements. Not to say it’s perfect, but my issues have been more from me rocking arch Linux and breaking my system than Nvidia issues
Honestly, I’ve never had this problem. Two GPUs, two clicks in the gui driver manager.
2009 called
It’s asking why things haven’t changed in 14 years
(things are somewhat better)
IT’S FIXED!
LOL isn’t that the truth. I wanted my desktop to not bother chugging watts through my 3090 and generating excess heat when barely KDE Plasma and a browser is running, but trying to set up GPU offload just left me with a blank terminal screen.
Thank God for the geniuses who implemented Snapper rollbacks in OpenSUSE! Otherwise, the Nvidia drivers in the repos work fine and I’m scared to touch them…
Is the power consumption really that much more? I guess there is a significant difference but it might still not cost much.
In a desktop you use the powerful GPU all the time.
In my use case the laptop is always attached to a charger.
Works fine for me? (opensuse tumbleweed)
Didn’t take much effort, hybrid mode got implemented automatically and then I just manually added a widget for quick switching between only integrated graphics, hybrid mode and only nvidia (basically never using that one, just either integrated or hybrid)
That’s nice! I’m glad it glad it worked so well for you. That’s the thing about configuration, sometimes it works without much effort!
I wish everyone shared your experience, but I guess it’s a YMMV kind of thing, right?
I’m generally very happy with opensuse tumbleweed, so far the best desktop distros I’ve tried. Very polished and user friendly.
This is actually an easy thing to do – usually. But you might get unlucky with the wrong hardware, as perhaps OP did.
pacman -S nvidia-dkms
Hollywood, here I come!
Partial updates are not supported on Arch. You need to use
-Syu
.I think you’re misunderstanding what a partial upgrade is.
A partial upgrade is where you update the database without then upgrading every package (calling
pacman -Sy
with theu
switch).pacman -S
, therefore, is not a partial upgrade, as the database is not updated with they
switch.See System maintenance#Partial upgrades are unsupported for more info.
Yeah, obviously, who wouldn’t know that
I thought dkms was recommended only for alternative kernels, and that nvidia or nvidia-open is what’s recommended generally.
Recommended, yes, but I’ve had issues with the pre-compiled modules before, so I switched to
nvidia-dkms
to make sure the binaries are always freshly baked.
I’ve never had trouble installing them. Getting them to work after an update is another story.
Lolz