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Honestly, I've had fewer problems with the proprietary Nvidia drivers than with nouveau, even on fairly old hardware. Both of my wife's desktops (home and offi

Honestly, I've had fewer problems with the proprietary Nvidia drivers than with nouveau, even on fairly old hardware. Both of my wife's desktops (home and office) started locking up randomly with a kernel oops due to the nouveau driver after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04. I realized that she had this bug, but in Ubuntu 18.04: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1559178 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1559178. No problems since switching to the proprietary drivers. I use FreeBSD, and also run the proprietary Nvidia drivers.

this_user 8y ago
Same here. I have also had fewer problems than with both the old proprietary or open source AMD drivers (never tested the new AMDGPU one). This went to far that I had to sell an AMD card to buy an Nvidia one, because features would not work the way there were supposed to. Eventually, I decided to stop buying AMD cards altogether. In contrast to that, the proprietary Nvidia drivers have been a godsend: Features just work, including complex multihead configurations. So, they may not be perfect, but, for the most part, they actually work.
sevensor 8y ago
I'll match you anecdote for anecdote -- one of the machines at work only works with Nouveau and locks up hard if you try the proprietary driver. Another works only with the proprietary driver and locks up hard if you try nouveau. A third one is flaky either way, unless you're running KDE. In which case it locks up hard. We've had no trouble at all with Intel or AMD. Even under Windows, we've had trouble with NVidia drivers randomly crashing and taking the system down with them.
- drewg123 8y ago
  The problems I always had with the Intel drivers in the past is that you often needed to be running a bleeding edge kernel to get support for them. This is less of a problem on Ubuntu now with the hw enablement kernels. I honestly stopped using AMD for graphics a decade ago when I had a card that was too old for the proprietary flglrx driver, but not old enough for the (at the time) feeble, community supported open source drivers. Maybe I should take another look at them. Amusingly, I'm typing this from an AMD Threadripper2 running with Nvidia graphics.
  - lasagnaphil 8y ago
    2 years ago I’ve started using Arch Linux for my laptop because of slow nvidia graphics driver updates from Ubuntu... Don’t know how things are nowadays Arch, being a rolling-release distribution, can always get you the latest driver updates with the package manager (but with the cost of being a little bit more work to maintain)
    - sevensor 8y ago
      I also use Arch, so I can't speak to the Ubuntu situation. I'd certainly hate to have to stay abreast of drivers on any other distribution. For all that Ubuntu promises that it Just Works, it seems like way too much trouble compared to Arch.
craftyguy 8y ago
Regardless of how well they work, the #1 problem is that they are a proprietary blob, which kills any chance of being able to trust it.

this_user 8y ago

Same here. I have also had fewer problems than with both the old proprietary or open source AMD drivers (never tested the new AMDGPU one). This went to far that I had to sell an AMD card to buy an Nvidia one, because features would not work the way there were supposed to. Eventually, I decided to stop buying AMD cards altogether. In contrast to that, the proprietary Nvidia drivers have been a godsend: Features just work, including complex multihead configurations. So, they may not be perfect, but, for the most part, they actually work.

sevensor 8y ago

I'll match you anecdote for anecdote -- one of the machines at work only works with Nouveau and locks up hard if you try the proprietary driver. Another works only with the proprietary driver and locks up hard if you try nouveau. A third one is flaky either way, unless you're running KDE. In which case it locks up hard. We've had no trouble at all with Intel or AMD. Even under Windows, we've had trouble with NVidia drivers randomly crashing and taking the system down with them.

drewg123 8y ago
The problems I always had with the Intel drivers in the past is that you often needed to be running a bleeding edge kernel to get support for them. This is less of a problem on Ubuntu now with the hw enablement kernels. I honestly stopped using AMD for graphics a decade ago when I had a card that was too old for the proprietary flglrx driver, but not old enough for the (at the time) feeble, community supported open source drivers. Maybe I should take another look at them. Amusingly, I'm typing this from an AMD Threadripper2 running with Nvidia graphics.
- lasagnaphil 8y ago
  2 years ago I’ve started using Arch Linux for my laptop because of slow nvidia graphics driver updates from Ubuntu... Don’t know how things are nowadays Arch, being a rolling-release distribution, can always get you the latest driver updates with the package manager (but with the cost of being a little bit more work to maintain)
  - sevensor 8y ago
    I also use Arch, so I can't speak to the Ubuntu situation. I'd certainly hate to have to stay abreast of drivers on any other distribution. For all that Ubuntu promises that it Just Works, it seems like way too much trouble compared to Arch.

craftyguy 8y ago

Regardless of how well they work, the #1 problem is that they are a proprietary blob, which kills any chance of being able to trust it.