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"Experimental Nvidia support has been deprecated since its inception, and has now been removed entirely. Please use nouveau and consider future purchases from G

"Experimental Nvidia support has been deprecated since its inception, and has now been removed entirely. Please use nouveau and consider future purchases from GPU vendors that support open source. Other proprietary drivers are also unsupported." How is nouveau doing this days compared to the proprietary drivers of NVidia ?

rusticpenn 8y ago
Yes, IT puts me in a wierd situation as I need nvidia for machine learning related stuff, and I would love to move from i3 to sway...
- naibafo 8y ago
  I have an integrated intel card in my notebook, and an extra nvidia card that I use with proprietary driver and bumblebee. That works great with sway
- robin_reala 8y ago
  Can you get a cheap Radeon as a display card?
  - Cacti 8y ago
    Why would anyone go out, buy a new Radeon, install it in their computers (assuming there is room, which in ML cases is not always true), and reconfigure any drivers and all the other hassle, just to use a window manager? That's assuming such a thing is even possible (e.g. work restrictions).
    - robin_reala 8y ago
      Because they “would love to move from i3 to sway”? The cheapest passive Radeon is less than $50 on Newegg and I’m sure a lot cheaper second-hand, and $50 doesn’t seem like much to spend on something one would love to do.
      - Cacti 8y ago
        You ignored most of my point. Many people have restrictions other than money.
heavenlyblue 8y ago
Doesn't support GPU power management on the newer cards akin to 1080 Ti. Thus X will never start if you've got more than a single 4K monitor; I suppose neither would GPGPU work. But I don't think I've had any other issues. BTW, I believe the reason it's not supported isn't because OS developers don't understand how it works - it's because Nvidia has never released the private keys associated with power management on the GPU. So the only thing Nvidia's got to do is to provide these keys to the open-source community. So it is a DRM issue.
trulyrandom 8y ago
It's not great in terms of performance in games, but it's perfectly usable on the desktop. I've been using sway on nouveau full time for a couple of days now and have had no issues so far.
- w0utert 8y ago
  Except when you are using a Quadro GPU, and nouveau will hard-lock the machine randomly (and has been doing so for at least 4 years)
  - sevensor 8y ago
    This has been my unfortunate experience.
brokencube 8y ago
Apparently, still not well: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-summer-2018&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-...
sametmax 8y ago
Imagine a world where Gnome doesn't support any proprietary card drivers, where VLC can't read non open codecs, where libre office can't open doc* files... Does that seems like a world where FOSS can be successful in ?
- arghwhat 8y ago
  That would work just fine. Intel HD, which basically everyone has, would work fine (and performs quite well). AMD also works. It's only nVidia that would be excluded, due to them acting like children and trying to push proprietary things as the only GPU vendor.
- roenxi 8y ago
  Yep. Particularly with hardware makers that strategy has worked remarkably well. Nvidia is actually the only major hardware company I know of (other than Apple who sorta don't count) who doesn't have a good open source driver. That isn't an ideological position, just all the other majors seem to support linux as a first class citizen across all product categories. There is also a difference between data exchange (codecs, doc*, etc) and drivers. Intransigence by the kernel community regarding closed source code has resulted in Good Things in the driver space.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Yet, it seems that the only very popular FOSS projects are the ones playing well with proprietary. Actually the most popular distrib is Ubuntu, precisely because of this.
    - loa-in-backup 8y ago
      This comment is tautologic
  - imtringued 8y ago
    What about ARM GPUs or PowerVR?
deaddodo 8y ago
They have a support matrix on their site[1]. The short of it is, every card has 2d support. There are very few lacking 3d acceleration. Newer cards have flimsy video acceleration. Power management is severely lacking across the board. Specific advanced features are hit or miss. Performance is still behind the proprietary driver in every case I've seen; but for cards from the 200 to 700 series, it's a smaller drop-off than newer cards. I'd recommend giving it a try and see how it works in your specific use case. I've personally never found a case where nouveau works well enough to drop the Nvidia driver, but I'm usually on the latest or next to latest gen. [1] - https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/ https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Sway/wlroots maintainer here. The older the card, the better the support. If you're not gaming and you have a 9xx or older card, you should have pretty decent support for a workstation type of deal. If you get as old as 7xx or 6xx you start to have games getting playable.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- arghwhat 8y ago
  Although note that recent Intel HD should outperform those cards, with much better power efficiency. For newer cards, nouveau can be a quite sad experience due to nvidia not only making a mess of their own driver, but actively handicapping development of nouveau.
ratsimihah 8y ago
What does that exactly mean for Nvidia GPU users?
- trulyrandom 8y ago
  It means that you can't use sway (or any other compositor based on wlroots) with the proprietary nvidia driver. Instead, you should use the nouveau driver.
  - josefx 8y ago
    My experiences with nouveau have been anything but stable. I don't know why people would recommend alpha quality software over alternatives.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  You have a choice of A: give up the improved performance and features of the proprietary driver to use i3 with wayland, no longer able to take screenshots or use secondary monitors B: continue using i3 with X
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    You can take screenshots and use secondary monitors on sway, I use four displays at home, including one rotated 90 degrees and one 4K display, to make sure I test each use-case before anything breaks for end-users. The performance of the novueau driver is adequate for most non-gaming workstations.
    - jcelerier 8y ago
      > You can take screenshots can you, with any app that takes screenshots ? e.g. with SimpleScreenRecorder or flameshot ?
      - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
        No, they will require patches to support Wayland. But we have created portable protocols which will allow you to take screenshots on 10+ Wayland compositors and are on track for standardization. Third-party screenshot clients already exist, like grim: https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/ https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/
vectorEQ 8y ago
i think you will be happy to hear since 2014 they can alterr the clock speeds and get out of the boot frquency of the cards which gives them somewhat normal performance. there is a bit of an issue still to reverse features implemented on the cards. this is a daunting task. these features make some functions in games or renderers run much smoother than directly rendering them or using non-specific resources for them ,which is why on a lot of places there is still considerable performance loss compared to nvidias own drivers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software) here is some interesting info on the state, with a lot of references nvidia are a bunch of dicks who have no real reason to keep their specifications closed other than to (speculating) hide things they don't want you to see. patents and other things will still protect their IP / featuresets even if they open it.... intel/amd are where people should invest, especially people who are using alternate (non-windows) platforms, since nvidia will never open their sources, and amd/intel will never improve the way you want if you don't invest in their future!
- pimeys 8y ago
  What I understood one of the reasons they keep their source closed is that it's full of stuff like: `if (game == "Fifa2016") use_nvidia_custom_shaders() ...` So games don't work quite fast and the game companies ask nVidia to fix it in their drivers, which might do stuff such as adding custom shaders to get that good fps. That's why many major games require you to update to the latest nVidia drivers before running. I don't know how much AMD does this, their open source support is excellent nowadays.
- auanfaz 8y ago
  >patents and other things will still protect their IP / featuresets even if they open it.... That's not how it works. Even if you patent something others can copy it (and I don't mean just the source, but the idea, algorithm, implementation) and use it in their products and then you're left with the work of completely reverse engineer them, figure it all out, then sue them, etc. So you can either do that or just never open your source. Who can blame them?
  - 8y ago
Cacti 8y ago
"Please use nouveau and consider future purchases from GPU vendors that support open source. Other proprietary drivers are also unsupported." Uh... how about I just not use your software? I'm not going to replace a couple thousand dollars in GPUs, or even buy a new specific GPU just so I can use your software.
- glibgil 8y ago
  This is also acceptable. Please, never use Sway
- arghwhat 8y ago
  Your pick. Nvidia are assholes, though, and should not be supported directly at any cost. They need to learn to grow up. Also, what the hell are you using a couple thousand dollars in consumer nVidia GPUs for on a Linux system?
  - Filligree 8y ago
    Machine learning, probably. Nvidia is still the best option for that.
    - franga2000 8y ago
      In that case, you don't really need graphics at all. It's perfectly possible to use a card with good drivers for your displays (even the Intel IGPUs are good enough for that) and do your machine learning with the nvidia GPU and whatever blob they provide.
      - Cacti 8y ago
        I don't have integrated graphics on these machines, and there is no room for additional cards, and if there was, I would either be putting in another NVIDIA card, or RAID, or 10Gb or the many other things that will actually improve our use of these machines. Also, these are company/org machines, I can't just go putting random ass hardware in them because someone wants to use a window manager. What you're suggesting may be fine for casual desktop users at home, but in many cases it's simply not possible.

rusticpenn 8y ago

Yes, IT puts me in a wierd situation as I need nvidia for machine learning related stuff, and I would love to move from i3 to sway...

naibafo 8y ago
I have an integrated intel card in my notebook, and an extra nvidia card that I use with proprietary driver and bumblebee. That works great with sway
robin_reala 8y ago
Can you get a cheap Radeon as a display card?
- Cacti 8y ago
  Why would anyone go out, buy a new Radeon, install it in their computers (assuming there is room, which in ML cases is not always true), and reconfigure any drivers and all the other hassle, just to use a window manager? That's assuming such a thing is even possible (e.g. work restrictions).
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    Because they “would love to move from i3 to sway”? The cheapest passive Radeon is less than $50 on Newegg and I’m sure a lot cheaper second-hand, and $50 doesn’t seem like much to spend on something one would love to do.
    - Cacti 8y ago
      You ignored most of my point. Many people have restrictions other than money.

heavenlyblue 8y ago

Doesn't support GPU power management on the newer cards akin to 1080 Ti. Thus X will never start if you've got more than a single 4K monitor; I suppose neither would GPGPU work. But I don't think I've had any other issues. BTW, I believe the reason it's not supported isn't because OS developers don't understand how it works - it's because Nvidia has never released the private keys associated with power management on the GPU. So the only thing Nvidia's got to do is to provide these keys to the open-source community. So it is a DRM issue.

trulyrandom 8y ago

It's not great in terms of performance in games, but it's perfectly usable on the desktop. I've been using sway on nouveau full time for a couple of days now and have had no issues so far.

w0utert 8y ago
Except when you are using a Quadro GPU, and nouveau will hard-lock the machine randomly (and has been doing so for at least 4 years)
- sevensor 8y ago
  This has been my unfortunate experience.

brokencube 8y ago

Apparently, still not well: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-summer-2018&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-...

sametmax 8y ago

Imagine a world where Gnome doesn't support any proprietary card drivers, where VLC can't read non open codecs, where libre office can't open doc* files... Does that seems like a world where FOSS can be successful in ?

arghwhat 8y ago
That would work just fine. Intel HD, which basically everyone has, would work fine (and performs quite well). AMD also works. It's only nVidia that would be excluded, due to them acting like children and trying to push proprietary things as the only GPU vendor.
roenxi 8y ago
Yep. Particularly with hardware makers that strategy has worked remarkably well. Nvidia is actually the only major hardware company I know of (other than Apple who sorta don't count) who doesn't have a good open source driver. That isn't an ideological position, just all the other majors seem to support linux as a first class citizen across all product categories. There is also a difference between data exchange (codecs, doc*, etc) and drivers. Intransigence by the kernel community regarding closed source code has resulted in Good Things in the driver space.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Yet, it seems that the only very popular FOSS projects are the ones playing well with proprietary. Actually the most popular distrib is Ubuntu, precisely because of this.
  - loa-in-backup 8y ago
    This comment is tautologic
- imtringued 8y ago
  What about ARM GPUs or PowerVR?

deaddodo 8y ago

They have a support matrix on their site[1]. The short of it is, every card has 2d support. There are very few lacking 3d acceleration. Newer cards have flimsy video acceleration. Power management is severely lacking across the board. Specific advanced features are hit or miss. Performance is still behind the proprietary driver in every case I've seen; but for cards from the 200 to 700 series, it's a smaller drop-off than newer cards. I'd recommend giving it a try and see how it works in your specific use case. I've personally never found a case where nouveau works well enough to drop the Nvidia driver, but I'm usually on the latest or next to latest gen. [1] - https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/ https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

Sway/wlroots maintainer here. The older the card, the better the support. If you're not gaming and you have a 9xx or older card, you should have pretty decent support for a workstation type of deal. If you get as old as 7xx or 6xx you start to have games getting playable.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
arghwhat 8y ago
Although note that recent Intel HD should outperform those cards, with much better power efficiency. For newer cards, nouveau can be a quite sad experience due to nvidia not only making a mess of their own driver, but actively handicapping development of nouveau.

ratsimihah 8y ago

What does that exactly mean for Nvidia GPU users?

trulyrandom 8y ago
It means that you can't use sway (or any other compositor based on wlroots) with the proprietary nvidia driver. Instead, you should use the nouveau driver.
- josefx 8y ago
  My experiences with nouveau have been anything but stable. I don't know why people would recommend alpha quality software over alternatives.
hannasanarion 8y ago
You have a choice of A: give up the improved performance and features of the proprietary driver to use i3 with wayland, no longer able to take screenshots or use secondary monitors B: continue using i3 with X
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  You can take screenshots and use secondary monitors on sway, I use four displays at home, including one rotated 90 degrees and one 4K display, to make sure I test each use-case before anything breaks for end-users. The performance of the novueau driver is adequate for most non-gaming workstations.
  - jcelerier 8y ago
    > You can take screenshots can you, with any app that takes screenshots ? e.g. with SimpleScreenRecorder or flameshot ?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      No, they will require patches to support Wayland. But we have created portable protocols which will allow you to take screenshots on 10+ Wayland compositors and are on track for standardization. Third-party screenshot clients already exist, like grim: https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/ https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/

vectorEQ 8y ago

i think you will be happy to hear since 2014 they can alterr the clock speeds and get out of the boot frquency of the cards which gives them somewhat normal performance. there is a bit of an issue still to reverse features implemented on the cards. this is a daunting task. these features make some functions in games or renderers run much smoother than directly rendering them or using non-specific resources for them ,which is why on a lot of places there is still considerable performance loss compared to nvidias own drivers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software) here is some interesting info on the state, with a lot of references nvidia are a bunch of dicks who have no real reason to keep their specifications closed other than to (speculating) hide things they don't want you to see. patents and other things will still protect their IP / featuresets even if they open it.... intel/amd are where people should invest, especially people who are using alternate (non-windows) platforms, since nvidia will never open their sources, and amd/intel will never improve the way you want if you don't invest in their future!

pimeys 8y ago
What I understood one of the reasons they keep their source closed is that it's full of stuff like: `if (game == "Fifa2016") use_nvidia_custom_shaders() ...` So games don't work quite fast and the game companies ask nVidia to fix it in their drivers, which might do stuff such as adding custom shaders to get that good fps. That's why many major games require you to update to the latest nVidia drivers before running. I don't know how much AMD does this, their open source support is excellent nowadays.
auanfaz 8y ago
>patents and other things will still protect their IP / featuresets even if they open it.... That's not how it works. Even if you patent something others can copy it (and I don't mean just the source, but the idea, algorithm, implementation) and use it in their products and then you're left with the work of completely reverse engineer them, figure it all out, then sue them, etc. So you can either do that or just never open your source. Who can blame them?
- 8y ago

Cacti 8y ago

"Please use nouveau and consider future purchases from GPU vendors that support open source. Other proprietary drivers are also unsupported." Uh... how about I just not use your software? I'm not going to replace a couple thousand dollars in GPUs, or even buy a new specific GPU just so I can use your software.

glibgil 8y ago
This is also acceptable. Please, never use Sway
arghwhat 8y ago
Your pick. Nvidia are assholes, though, and should not be supported directly at any cost. They need to learn to grow up. Also, what the hell are you using a couple thousand dollars in consumer nVidia GPUs for on a Linux system?
- Filligree 8y ago
  Machine learning, probably. Nvidia is still the best option for that.
  - franga2000 8y ago
    In that case, you don't really need graphics at all. It's perfectly possible to use a card with good drivers for your displays (even the Intel IGPUs are good enough for that) and do your machine learning with the nvidia GPU and whatever blob they provide.
    - Cacti 8y ago
      I don't have integrated graphics on these machines, and there is no room for additional cards, and if there was, I would either be putting in another NVIDIA card, or RAID, or 10Gb or the many other things that will actually improve our use of these machines. Also, these are company/org machines, I can't just go putting random ass hardware in them because someone wants to use a window manager. What you're suggesting may be fine for casual desktop users at home, but in many cases it's simply not possible.