Thats why i never buy their shit after having one laptop with one of their graphics. Worst part? I’m still using that laptop, im doing troubleshooting right now. Anyone else?
The context seems to be missing.
Not an nvidia dev, but so far all my cards been nvidia, went over a quite a few of them, both laptop and desktops. In my experience they just work once you install proprietary drivers and the only type of a problem is when ubuntu silently decides to upgrade it behind your back - in this case you need to restart the machine so kernel modules match the drivers.
Do agree for the most part, I had issues every now and again with having to downgrade cause some games didn’t work on the newest driver. But for the most part they’ve been pretty ok
In my experience they just work once you install proprietary drivers
That’s not my experience with dual-GPU (Intel+Nvidia) hardware and multiple displays, where the standard xrandr functions are often used to modify the output configuration.
In my case, the Nvidia GPU is supported by Nouveau, so I can compare it with Nvidia’s proprietary drivers “side-by-side”. With Nouveau, display output configuration and per-application GPU selection both “just work” (I did add a
nouveau.configkernel parameter to enable acceleration). I’ve never been able to make the proprietary drivers do those things reliably.So I suggest that users with simple single-display, single-GPU systems are likely to have a better experience with the proprietary drivers.
As is the general consensus here, I do not plan to purchase any Nvidia GPU hardware in the future, especially considering that more recent Nvidia GPUs now require signed firmware, making Nouveau support impossible.
I agree. Nvidia drivers work fine for desktop systems with a single GPU and a single display. Everything else is a bit hit and miss. Here are a couple of real world experiences I’ve had with using linux on systems with nvidia.
Laptops with switchable graphics are the worst. You might have set up switchable graphics with bumblebee or something thinking that everything works fine. Until you need to connect your laptop to a projector for holding a presentation or something. Then you find that you can’t connect an external display without disabling the integrated graphics in UEFI settings (causing terrible battery life), because the hdmi out is only connected to the nvidia GPU.
I’ve also had issues on a desktop with two monitors recently, where nvidia wouldn’t respect my preferences for main monitor. The XFCE main panel would be stuck on my secondary monitor, as nvidia has decided that it is the primary display, even if I’ve selected something else in settings. If I worked around this by creating a new panel on the correct monitor, this panel would not be visible if I try to connect remotely with XRDP.
first thing i faced while distrohopping before i settle with fedora, is the instability of nvidia on linux.
it was short path to decision to spare myself of waiting for driver fixes, googling for driver statuses, waiting, posting questions, messing around, switching this and that in hope for better stability, getting frustrated in the end because wherever i search for fixes, there were posts about same problems with same subject: nvidia.
stable system throughout distro/kernel/driver/system updates is hugely more valuable than having GTX Ti 90000 inside my system and it was a very short bye bye.
since i ditched nvidia card and went for amd one, my system just works, it’s been years, I’ve never looked back and very honestly, i couldn’t care less about never ending stubborn struggle with nvidia.
Same, I’m still using my powerful rx 490 in desktop and not even once has gave me problems.
I bought this laptop back when I was still using windows, a really good Asus x450LN, wich still allows me to play battlebit, xcom, openxcom, sunless sea/sky, and so on. Not even talkin about office work. So yeah, I’m gonna change it in maybe 2 or 3 years.
For now ? Dealing with nvidia shenanigans. I have a GUI again wich is good, but steam is fricking dead, so yeah, hopefully I’m not gonna need to reinstall.
I upgraded to a 6700xt from my 1660 and AMD has absolutely no problems in my system. It’s amazing.
Same, Recently updated my AMD card. Literally did nothing but turn the computer off, remove the old one, install the new one,turn it back on, and it just worked.
I’ve had enough experience with trying to get nvidia cards working in linux that I know that I’ll never, ever, ever use a nvidia card, and thats including trying to use distros that supposedly bake nvidia bullshit in to make it no hassle, like Pop.
Which sucks. I’m not a corporate fanboy, I just want something affordable and that works… and right now, on linux, thats just amd. Intel is a close second, though they need another generation or two to iron out their flaws.
Presses “That was easy” ‘easy’ button
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.
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.
I, too, don’t want any more Nvidia hardware.
Thanks for the info!
Nouveau at least for the GPU I’ve got is worse than just using integrated graphics
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).
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 decided to take a look and I think it’s called Nvidia Optimus. A more general term would be hybrid graphics I guess.
And I think I may have come across the Bumblebee project back then: https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project
Maybe this helps.
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=1to 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.
Now that sounds interesting. I did not know about that.
“Works on my machine…” Classic dev response, lol.
Fuck Nvidia. Never again.
Same. Thankfully I found that pop!_os works beautifully out of the box and serves my purpose. But I’m done with nvidia. Once my 3090 lives till EOL I’m getting whatever XTX model AMD has
services.xserver.videoDrivers = [“nvidia”]; go brrr
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…
Team red ftw
I’ve never had a problem with the Nvidia driver in Arch. I’m convinced more often than not it’s your distros fault it’s not working right
Yeah, I’ve had no problems either, my distribution handles the NV drivers without issues. I use a Laptop with Intel+NV3060.
Been fine in opensuse Tumbleweed too.
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
My last nvidia card (a 1050) had some weird non-obvious (likely hardware) issue that caused it to utterly lose its mind when faced with certain OpenGL shaders, but only when running the proprietary driver. It would throw bands of static on the screen or randomly drop the signal to the monitor. This persisted through several changes of kernel and driver version. It was solid under nouveau, but the performance suffered such that I noticed a lag even for just normal desktop use. In the end, I replaced it with an AMD card rather than attempt to troubleshoot it any further. My previous nvidia cards were solid, though.
It’s ironic but unsurprising, and my experience too, that some functionality works better with Nouveau than with the proprietary Nvidia drivers.
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.
No, my sister’s system has the exact same symptoms, despite using the Ubuntu GUI. So at least under some conditions it’s accurate.
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…