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I'm using an Nvidia RTX 3090 on Linux with the proprietary drivers for machine learning and man it fucking sucks as a desktop lately. So my best guess is nobod

I'm using an Nvidia RTX 3090 on Linux with the proprietary drivers for machine learning and man it fucking sucks as a desktop lately. So my best guess is nobody at Nvidia uses the Linux desktop as a workstation. 1) My HDMI screen hasn't been able to wake from sleep for over a year now, the only way to make it wake is to switch to a text tty and then back to X11. 2) Wayland still isn't supported. The default Ubuntu 18.04 gdm doesn't even work so on first boot with the proprietary driver everything seems broken. 3) Since Firefox 89 switched to accelerated rendering by default, windows randomly disappear and various video players have lock contention, drop frames at 60fps, and downscale video on a fucking $1600 video card. 4) HDMI audio crackles and pops with a 2 second delay after a few hours and I have to restart pulseaudio on the command line. 5) I file support tickets on Nvidia's website and the company never responds, they don't even dupe them with some other old ticket.

isatty 5y ago
(1) works fine for me over DP, didn’t try HDMI. (4) sounds (heh) like a pulseaudio problem.
mceachen 5y ago
I recently switched to the 465 driver (on Ubuntu 20.04) and had issues: try downgrading back to 460 if you're in the same boat.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  That happened to me yesterday on my work laptop. System 76's help documentation said to chroot in from rescue media, uninstall the drivers, then reinstall, and that worked fine, so it's now running 465 perfectly well. No idea why the straight upgrade path doesn't work. But that's completely an Ubuntu problem, not NVIDIA. Like a (currently) higher up comment says, NVIDIA on Linux works fine as long as you're running the latest version of everything. My main desktop was built last April and I've been running Arch with RTX 2070 and the latest NVIDIA drivers ever since first boot and it has never given me any trouble, video or audio. My display is a 50 inch OLED connected via HDMI and audio a 5-channel soundbar with external subwoofer using eARC from the display. Everything is fine using GNOME defaults. NVIDIA provides the nvidia-xconfig tool to autogenerate the X configuration, but you don't need it. It runs fine with no config. Wayland has worked for over a year, too. You can go look at the PKGBUILD file for Arch's PulseAudio installer and it isn't doing anything special, either, just applying the suggest default from PulseAudio's documentation making the ALSA default module pulse. The only reason NVIDIA on Linux gives people so many problems is they're trying to run old versions of everything on enterprise-oriented Linux distros or "long-term support" without purchasing support. If you want the latest hardware, use the latest software.
phantom0308 5y ago
The software focused teams all use Linux workstations afaik, look at their job boards and blind. Their embedded systems (robotics / av) are all Linux as well.
- CoolGuySteve 5y ago
  I simply do not believe that given how bad their drivers are. I would not be surprised if most or all of their Linux engineers ssh into Linux from a Windows machine given how stable their command line stuff is in comparison to the graphics (once you figure out the correct permutation of userland/kernel pieces to get CUDA+cudnn+TF working anyways).
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    Their recommended method of installing cuda includes a 64-bit version, but not a 32-bit version. Nvidia's cuda packages are marked as incompatible with debian's nvidia-driver-* packages, so installing it uninstalls the 32-bit version. As a result, I need to choose between steam (which uses the 32-bit graphics library) and an updated cuda version (since Ubuntu 20.04's repo is pinned at 10.2).
    - my123 5y ago
      Install the cuda-toolkit- package instead of the cuda- package in that usecase.
qq4 5y ago
I ended up selling my Nvidia card for an AMD one. I was having so many problems with Linux like you're describing, and now they're all gone :)
- CoolGuySteve 5y ago
  Yeah I can't remember ever having any problems with Intel graphics on all the laptops I've owned. It's night and day how much Intel cares about Linux compared to Nvidia.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    Indeed it's night and day how Intel performs compared to Nvidia as well.
    - HelloNurse 5y ago
      I'll never forget Intel for lying about OpenGL support in some old laptop drivers for Windows.
    - CoolGuySteve 5y ago
      Yeah you’re right, even low power Intel gpus can render an X11 desktop with audio wayyyyy faster and with less artifacts than the proprietary nvidia driver.
jiofih 5y ago
“But everything just works” says the Linux enthusiast after fiddling with their xorg config in the morning.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  That is true but I would like that point out that windows still has issues on my bog standard Intel/Nvidia rig - e.g. Linux can't sleep properly, but windows either fails to resume properly or randomly wakes me up at night by revving turning back on and revving the fans. Similarly, my new iPad pro is great until you need to do something apple haven't approved of (e.g. I can't watch a bunch of movies I have had copies of for years due to apple not letting VLC ship certain codecs)
jcelerier 5y ago
> The default Ubuntu 18.04 gdm doesn't even work I mean, using ubuntu 18.04 means using ~4/5 years old software which only gets "security updates" (not even patch updates, e.g. they use a Qt LTS from 2017 and don't even update the patch version, it's still 5.9.5 while Qt's is 5.9.9), why would you expect things to work correctly with a 1 year old graphics card. On archlinux wayland with an nvidia card works pretty much fine.
- schmorptron 5y ago
  Do they not port the HWE to older LTS releases?
- CoolGuySteve 5y ago
  This has been broken since 2019. I’m running Ubuntu 20.04 with the 5.11 kernel and the 460/465 drivers and all these problems are still happening. And also, yes, I expect a 5 year old operating system to still work. Windows 10 does and it came out in 2015. These are professional tools for my fucking job.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    > And also, yes, I expect a 5 year old operating system to still work. Windows 10 does and it came out in 2015. but the windows 10 you run in 2021 is super different from the windows 10 you installed in 2015, there are ton of (sometimes fairly breaking) updates : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_version_history running an up-to-date win10 is basically equivalent to updating to every ubuntu release, LTS or not. Kernel is different, libc is different, system APIs implementations are different, everything is updated every few months - even the start menu pretty much changes all the time.

isatty 5y ago

(1) works fine for me over DP, didn’t try HDMI. (4) sounds (heh) like a pulseaudio problem.

mceachen 5y ago

I recently switched to the 465 driver (on Ubuntu 20.04) and had issues: try downgrading back to 460 if you're in the same boat.

nonameiguess 5y ago
That happened to me yesterday on my work laptop. System 76's help documentation said to chroot in from rescue media, uninstall the drivers, then reinstall, and that worked fine, so it's now running 465 perfectly well. No idea why the straight upgrade path doesn't work. But that's completely an Ubuntu problem, not NVIDIA. Like a (currently) higher up comment says, NVIDIA on Linux works fine as long as you're running the latest version of everything. My main desktop was built last April and I've been running Arch with RTX 2070 and the latest NVIDIA drivers ever since first boot and it has never given me any trouble, video or audio. My display is a 50 inch OLED connected via HDMI and audio a 5-channel soundbar with external subwoofer using eARC from the display. Everything is fine using GNOME defaults. NVIDIA provides the nvidia-xconfig tool to autogenerate the X configuration, but you don't need it. It runs fine with no config. Wayland has worked for over a year, too. You can go look at the PKGBUILD file for Arch's PulseAudio installer and it isn't doing anything special, either, just applying the suggest default from PulseAudio's documentation making the ALSA default module pulse. The only reason NVIDIA on Linux gives people so many problems is they're trying to run old versions of everything on enterprise-oriented Linux distros or "long-term support" without purchasing support. If you want the latest hardware, use the latest software.

phantom0308 5y ago

The software focused teams all use Linux workstations afaik, look at their job boards and blind. Their embedded systems (robotics / av) are all Linux as well.

CoolGuySteve 5y ago
I simply do not believe that given how bad their drivers are. I would not be surprised if most or all of their Linux engineers ssh into Linux from a Windows machine given how stable their command line stuff is in comparison to the graphics (once you figure out the correct permutation of userland/kernel pieces to get CUDA+cudnn+TF working anyways).
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Their recommended method of installing cuda includes a 64-bit version, but not a 32-bit version. Nvidia's cuda packages are marked as incompatible with debian's nvidia-driver-* packages, so installing it uninstalls the 32-bit version. As a result, I need to choose between steam (which uses the 32-bit graphics library) and an updated cuda version (since Ubuntu 20.04's repo is pinned at 10.2).
  - my123 5y ago
    Install the cuda-toolkit- package instead of the cuda- package in that usecase.

qq4 5y ago

I ended up selling my Nvidia card for an AMD one. I was having so many problems with Linux like you're describing, and now they're all gone :)

CoolGuySteve 5y ago
Yeah I can't remember ever having any problems with Intel graphics on all the laptops I've owned. It's night and day how much Intel cares about Linux compared to Nvidia.
- 1_player 5y ago
  Indeed it's night and day how Intel performs compared to Nvidia as well.
  - HelloNurse 5y ago
    I'll never forget Intel for lying about OpenGL support in some old laptop drivers for Windows.
  - CoolGuySteve 5y ago
    Yeah you’re right, even low power Intel gpus can render an X11 desktop with audio wayyyyy faster and with less artifacts than the proprietary nvidia driver.

jiofih 5y ago

“But everything just works” says the Linux enthusiast after fiddling with their xorg config in the morning.

mhh__ 5y ago
That is true but I would like that point out that windows still has issues on my bog standard Intel/Nvidia rig - e.g. Linux can't sleep properly, but windows either fails to resume properly or randomly wakes me up at night by revving turning back on and revving the fans. Similarly, my new iPad pro is great until you need to do something apple haven't approved of (e.g. I can't watch a bunch of movies I have had copies of for years due to apple not letting VLC ship certain codecs)

jcelerier 5y ago

> The default Ubuntu 18.04 gdm doesn't even work I mean, using ubuntu 18.04 means using ~4/5 years old software which only gets "security updates" (not even patch updates, e.g. they use a Qt LTS from 2017 and don't even update the patch version, it's still 5.9.5 while Qt's is 5.9.9), why would you expect things to work correctly with a 1 year old graphics card. On archlinux wayland with an nvidia card works pretty much fine.

schmorptron 5y ago
Do they not port the HWE to older LTS releases?
CoolGuySteve 5y ago
This has been broken since 2019. I’m running Ubuntu 20.04 with the 5.11 kernel and the 460/465 drivers and all these problems are still happening. And also, yes, I expect a 5 year old operating system to still work. Windows 10 does and it came out in 2015. These are professional tools for my fucking job.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > And also, yes, I expect a 5 year old operating system to still work. Windows 10 does and it came out in 2015. but the windows 10 you run in 2021 is super different from the windows 10 you installed in 2015, there are ton of (sometimes fairly breaking) updates : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_version_history running an up-to-date win10 is basically equivalent to updating to every ubuntu release, LTS or not. Kernel is different, libc is different, system APIs implementations are different, everything is updated every few months - even the start menu pretty much changes all the time.