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I'm surprised it's not higher. Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users. The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers. To echo Linus

I'm surprised it's not higher. Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users. The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers. To echo Linus Torvalds, and for good reason, fuck Nvidia

sznio 3y ago
>The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers. And the worst part of gaming on AMD is dealing with AMD's drivers, no matter the platform.
- anonbanker 3y ago
  Steam Deck users don't seem to be complaining at all about their experience.
Gordonjcp 3y ago
[flagged]
- deadbunny 3y ago
  What? AMD develop their open source drivers and submit them to the kernel and they have their own set of Linux specific closed source drivers.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    To be fair, pre-amdgpu, nvidia's proprietary linux drivers were sadly an exceptional "supported" situation. Back then it was basically just Intel's integrated graphics that had first-class mainline support. The AMD linux support is a relatively recent shift historically speaking. Intel really should get a lot more recognition for its mainline Linux graphics support though. Without their contributions over past decades we might not even have a modern graphics stack at all in-kernel.
  - Gordonjcp 3y ago
    Yes, and the open-source ones are not accelerated, and the closed-source ones don't work.
    - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
      Please don't spread misinformation. AMD GPUs have had full 3d acceleration out of the box for several years now. I use Linux exclusively and had great performance in 3D games on R9 380, RX 570, and RX 580, all using the mainline (obviously FOSS) driver.
      - trelane 3y ago
        Yep, and the docs are freely available. https://gpuopen.com/amd-isa-documentation/ https://gpuopen.com/amd-isa-documentation/ for AMD. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/graphics-for-linux/developer-reference/1-0/discrete-gpu.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/graphics-for-li... for Intel
      - Gordonjcp 3y ago
        No, it's got useless crippled acceleration that's only suitable for games. You can't use them for video.
        anonbanker 3y ago
        Vulkan Video is literally supported in ffmpeg.
        Gordonjcp 3y ago
        Okay, let me know how you get on editing video in ffmpeg. ffmpeg is one very small but important part of a complex chain.
    - itsboring 3y ago
      Wow, software 3D rendering must have really gotten fast then. I play all my Steam games on Linux using the open source amdgpu driver. Or maybe I just imagined all those extra frames in RDR2. Someone should tell Valve that the Steam Deck could be a lot faster. Or, I guess the other option is that you’re spreading misinformation.
  - lmm 3y ago
    They still suck though. I fully believe they're trying their best - AMD apparently can't write production-quality graphics drivers on Windows either - but I don't think they're reliable enough to be called "supported hardware", at least not yet.
- dbeley 3y ago
  No they're not
- publicmail 3y ago
  Both AMD and Intel have actively-maintained open source drivers in the Linux kernel.
  - Gordonjcp 3y ago
    Both of which are useless for video.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deadbunny 3y ago
CPU, not GPU...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
littlestymaar 3y ago
This is about CPU, son AMD vs Intel, not GPU for which AMD is competing against Nvidia
- paulmd 3y ago
  the positive/negative parasocial relationships people have with AMD and NVIDIA (respectively) borders on "splitting" in the personality-disorder sense. AMD represents everything wholesome and good about computing and nvidia represents everything bad and malicious about computing, to a lot of people. And when they see one of the brands they just have to hammer that post button to signal their virtue.
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    >AMD represents everything wholesome and good about computing Must be an opinion of someone who has never had to deal with AMD customer support.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    You're reading way too far into someone getting the context wrong.
    - izacus 3y ago
      Nah, these off topic rants are pretty much there in every single topic here. Every AMD/nVidia article has bunch of people just ranting without even trying to read the topic.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        When the topic is explicitly a popularity contest, talking about which one is better is pretty reasonable.
        izacus 3y ago
        No, ranting how nVidia kicked your dog because your favorite screensaver doesn't work in a topic about CUDA computation on Linux is not reasonable.
aero-glide2 3y ago
This is about CPU, not GPU. Also dealing with AMD GPU drivers is just as difficult.
- atq2119 3y ago
  AMD GPU drivers come with Linux distributions by default. There's literally nothing you have to do, unless your GPU is very recent.
  - dietr1ch 3y ago
    My gpu is quite recent and the only thing I had to do was make sure I'm running a recent kernel.
    - mort96 3y ago
      I also had to make sure I'm running a decent enough MESA and a recent enough llvm and a recent enough linux-firmware. It's not trivial. But if you're on a distro with a recent enough version of those things, it Just Works. I do wish distros like Ubuntu were more on the ball with regards to hardware support though. Ideally, someone running an up to date Ubuntu LTS should have a system which just works with new AMD hardware within at most a few weeks. It's currently a matter of many many months.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  > Also dealing with AMD GPU drivers is just as difficult. This was true ten years ago, and remains true only for hardware dating back to that time period. My old HD7850 is a royal pain to get running properly on a modern distro. For any remotely recent GPU that's supported by what's built into the linux kernel, it's pretty much seamless. There are no specific driver updates to deal with, which model of card does not matter, etc. It's all just built into the kernel.
  - yoshamano 3y ago
    This has been my experience with my Radeon RX 6750 XT and Manjaro. I didn't have to do anything and it just works. I use Steam/Proton to game and that just works as well.
michaelmrose 3y ago
Do you game on a laptop? The only thing you do with Nvidia on desktop is $install-cmd nvidia
severino 3y ago
> Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users Actually, Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years. You remember fglrx and that stuff? Well, Nvidia worked.
- johnny22 3y ago
  yep. nvidia was the only choice back then. I don't see how folks have forgoten that. But, now it's all AMD for me, because amd doesn't require a closed source driver or userspace. Apparently that will change in the next year or so though. It'll be interesting to see how the open nvidia stuff compares in the future.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mort96 3y ago
    Nvidia will always require a closed source userspace, the only part they've opened is the kernel side. And the new kernel driver only works for 2000 series or newer. But it's still a pretty huge step in the right direction, even though it won't be as nice as AMD's fully open source and upstreamed driver.
  - silisili 3y ago
    Some people have no idea how nice it is now compared to 15 or 20 years ago. I took an NVME out of an Intel machine, threw it into an AMD machine, booted it, and everything just worked, graphics included. No weird network drivers to track down, sound card drivers, proprietary graphics or even xf86- stuff needed.
- mort96 3y ago
  This was me. I had a Radeon 290x. It worked alright, but fglrx was terrible (and the config UI was the only non-English app in my system, it didn't respect locale settings), and when AMDGPU first arrived, it was a horribly buggy flickering mess. I upgraded to a 1080Ti after high-end Vega failed to materialise, and nvidia's drivers kind of just worked, especially on Ubuntu (they were proprietary of course, but so was fglrx). It wasn't really before Wayland started being a serious option that nvidia started to become a problem. I've now upgraded to a Radeon 7000 series GPU, and the open source drivers are a breeze and Wayland works much better than it does under nvidia's drivers. But I maintain that at least during the GTX 900 series through probably the 2000 series, nvidia was the only reasonable choice, even on Linux, especially if you wanted anything mid-range or above.
shams93 3y ago
Yeah what I found with these recent generation combo of nvidia + intel while powerful and while I can install linux, had issues with serious over heating causing a shut down where the nvidia driver was causing heat issues on the laptop, once switching back to windows 11, no more thermal issues.
treprinum 3y ago
Maybe my experience is vastly different, but Nvidia just works. I have a laptop with 3080, a Threadripper with 2x3090 and an Intel with a 4090 and A6000 and it works without any fuss in Linux (I mostly use it for Deep Learning but sometimes gaming as well).
- pizza234 3y ago
  > but Nvidia just works Not really. On some/several/many Nvidia cards (I had a few), one can't even boot with a stock Ubuntu CD, because Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD. AMD's drivers are at least open source and integrated in the kernel. On the other hand though, having owned several Nvidia and AMD cards, I didn't find any brand to be noticeably more stable than the other (each one had issues).
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    That sounds like a bug with Ubuntu not having the proper drivers.
  - SadTrombone 3y ago
    > Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD. In my opinion an open-source driver not written by Nvidia and an Ubuntu ISO not packaged by Nvidia aren't indicators of Nvidia "just work"ing or not. There are many distros where Nvidia drivers come installed out of the box.
    - mindslight 3y ago
      In my opinion, formed from over two decades of Linux, a piece of hardware having a libre driver written for it is the exact indicator of what can be relied upon to "just work". The last proprietary graphics driver I ran was fglrx for a laptop R1400. One day AMD/ATI just straight up removed that card from the driver, with the newer driver being required for the newer X, unilaterally declaring my laptop obsolete. Never again. (where I can help it. Mobile is obviously a forced-obsolescence dumpster fire)
gtirloni 3y ago
I installed the official drivers on Fedora 38 and Debian 12 lately and had zero problems with it. DKMS just rebuilds them after each kernel upgrade. Chrome and other stuff still don't work great but is that NVIDIA's fault? Honest question, I don't know.
renewiltord 3y ago
I’ve stuck to nvidia for years and it’s reliable on Linux. Needs proprietary drivers for full performance. I don’t think they’re actively hostile since they have drivers available. It used to be that you struggled to get acceleration. Nvidia drivers were the only reliable way. I had an ATI GPU too and drivers were not as good on Linux. Article is about CPU, though, and both manufacturers seem comparable. I have Ryzen for price/performance.
lom 3y ago
It’s CPU?
idonotknowwhy 3y ago
I've had nothing but issues with AMD on Linux. 7970,280x,rx580 and vega64. All of them had horrible bugs for what I was doing and amd opengl sucks. I eventually got sick of all the hard lock bugs running emulators, and the driver devs not wanting to fix it because Nintendo was their customer. Then I switched to nvidia and everything just works with similar performance to windows. Unless installing the drivers is too hard, nvidia is the best was to game on Linux
- code_duck 3y ago
  Installing the drivers is easy, but that doesn’t mean they work immediately. I got a fairly old computer a couple of years ago and put an RTX 3070 in it… I tried installing several distros and each of them would go through the install fine, then give a blank screen when I tried to boot. I tried all sorts of configuration and driver installations, both free and offical NVidia. I finally got one to work like it should, but it took about 10 days of messing with it.
- anonbanker 3y ago
  Spoilers: he was trying to install them all on Ubuntu 16.04
MBCook 3y ago
This is CPUs, not GPUs.
andrewstuart 3y ago
>> Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users. Nvidia has excellent Linux drivers.
- Benanov 3y ago
  Both these statements can be true. Their drivers can be excellent but try to do anything with your Linux machine after the Nvidia drivers are installed and you run into trouble. Ubuntu release upgrades used to be impossible w/ Nvidia drivers. You'd get into a situation where you'd boot into a text-only console, but because nvidia didn't do kms you'd get 40x25 with the first few characters off the screen. Now I buy AMD.
  - freeone3000 3y ago
    New kernel means driver reinstall, always. Apt now runs the dkms reinstall for you.
xethos 3y ago
I agree, but the article is about Intel vs AMD, not AMD vs nVidia marketshare among Linux gamers.
itvision 3y ago
> Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users. Citations and facts needed. Also, please enlighten us why NVIDIA owes Linux or its users anything. Please. Just take it slow. > The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers. NVIDIA [Linux] drivers have been the staple of quality and features for the past two decades sans rare f ups, such as 3090 Ti's dying (took them a week to fix) and frequents BSODs on Windows Vista (due to a completely new driver model which took them quite some time to polish). I'm pretty sure I've dealt with NVIDIA a lot more than you've ever done but I cannot relate to this statement at all despite being an NVIDIA Linux user for over two decades. I wouldn't claim that you're lying through your teeth, but I'm pretty sure that this post has a ton of emotions and very little essence. I'm not surprised to see hatred towards the company but in absolute most cases it doesn't mean anything.
- anonbanker 3y ago
  If you've been a 20-year Nvidia Linux user like I have, you'll have countless horror stories of system upgrades and kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop. How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed? How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again? How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason? If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago.
  - itvision 3y ago
    > If you've been a 20-year Nvidia Linux user like I have, you'll have countless horror stories of system upgrades and kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop. I've had zero "system breaks", neither has anyone who used a distro supplied driver package. And if you installed from the official SH file, well, you did it at your own risk and you had to understand what you were doing. In short, you're lying. > kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop. Again, didn't affect those who used a distro supplied package. Those who used the installer patched the kernel, which I've done countless times but over the past four years I've done it zero times. In short you're lying again. > How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed? Never ever happened to me or anyone who I know. Show me actual fixed bug reports where NVIDIA is blamed for breaking the DM or bust. I think you're now lying again. Xorg support in NVIDIA drivers have been stellar aside from older GPUs and older drivers not supporting newer Xorg releases but then HW companies do not owe you infinite support. People who expect their more than 15 year old GPUs to work with modern OS'es and support all the features are lunatics. > How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again? What?? Did you come up with this BS in your dream? I've been using NVIDIA since late 90s. Never ever in my entire life I've got the Xorg config file lost. In fact, and here's you lying again (!) Xorg reads this file and closes it right away. It doesn't keep it open. Under no conditions this file could have been lost now or ever. And Xorg has used auto configuration for almost a decade now if I'm not mistaken, so there's no xorg.conf file to speak of. I have a small file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d to enable CoolBits in the NVIDIA driver, that's it. > How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason? You are making stuff up. Again, there will be no bug reports, citations, anything. > If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago. I've been using NVIDIA since Riva TNT2, thank you very much. And the list is a lot longer than you could imagine including MX440, FX 5600 (it was horrible), GeForce 6100 (integrated GPU), 7600 GT, 8800 GT, GTX 660, GTX 1060 and now GTX 1660 Ti. I don't remember your nickname on nvnews.net (do you even know about this website? nah, I don't think so) - NVIDIA's Linux support forums in the late 90s/early 00s which tells to me everything. Almost everything you wrote (sans occasional kernel incompatibilities which did _not_ affected normal people) is just pure made up crap. I can show you nvnews.net and forums.developer.nvidia.com threads with actual issues but you've listed none. I'm the person who filed this https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/511 https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/511 and it affects countless people, mainly Turing users. I know how none other than kernel hackers _intentionally_ broke NVIDIA drivers recently by breaking EFI console, a malicious patch which was later reversed because it affected more than just NVIDIA drivers. And I also frequent kernel bugzilla and AMD/Intel bug trackers. They have far more serious bug reports. AMD drivers for certain GPUs have been broken for a large number of people in the past three "stable" releases, including 6.3.9, 10 and 11: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-9b7e08901a#comment-3066778 https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-9b7e0890... AMD open source drivers have become semi-decent maybe in the past two years at most. Oh, except, RocM. Intel fares better but they are not strangers to deal breaker regressions. No one is perfect, and trying to say that NVIDIA is hostile to Linux while offering a high quality driver is either malevolent or just mean but it's definitely not true at all. I know this crap dearly, sorry.

sznio 3y ago

>The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers. And the worst part of gaming on AMD is dealing with AMD's drivers, no matter the platform.

anonbanker 3y ago
Steam Deck users don't seem to be complaining at all about their experience.

Gordonjcp 3y ago

[flagged]

deadbunny 3y ago
What? AMD develop their open source drivers and submit them to the kernel and they have their own set of Linux specific closed source drivers.
- pengaru 3y ago
  To be fair, pre-amdgpu, nvidia's proprietary linux drivers were sadly an exceptional "supported" situation. Back then it was basically just Intel's integrated graphics that had first-class mainline support. The AMD linux support is a relatively recent shift historically speaking. Intel really should get a lot more recognition for its mainline Linux graphics support though. Without their contributions over past decades we might not even have a modern graphics stack at all in-kernel.
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  Yes, and the open-source ones are not accelerated, and the closed-source ones don't work.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    Please don't spread misinformation. AMD GPUs have had full 3d acceleration out of the box for several years now. I use Linux exclusively and had great performance in 3D games on R9 380, RX 570, and RX 580, all using the mainline (obviously FOSS) driver.
    - trelane 3y ago
      Yep, and the docs are freely available. https://gpuopen.com/amd-isa-documentation/ https://gpuopen.com/amd-isa-documentation/ for AMD. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/graphics-for-linux/developer-reference/1-0/discrete-gpu.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/graphics-for-li... for Intel
    - Gordonjcp 3y ago
      No, it's got useless crippled acceleration that's only suitable for games. You can't use them for video.
      - anonbanker 3y ago
        Vulkan Video is literally supported in ffmpeg.
        Gordonjcp 3y ago
        Okay, let me know how you get on editing video in ffmpeg. ffmpeg is one very small but important part of a complex chain.
  - itsboring 3y ago
    Wow, software 3D rendering must have really gotten fast then. I play all my Steam games on Linux using the open source amdgpu driver. Or maybe I just imagined all those extra frames in RDR2. Someone should tell Valve that the Steam Deck could be a lot faster. Or, I guess the other option is that you’re spreading misinformation.
- lmm 3y ago
  They still suck though. I fully believe they're trying their best - AMD apparently can't write production-quality graphics drivers on Windows either - but I don't think they're reliable enough to be called "supported hardware", at least not yet.
dbeley 3y ago
No they're not
publicmail 3y ago
Both AMD and Intel have actively-maintained open source drivers in the Linux kernel.
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  Both of which are useless for video.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deadbunny 3y ago

CPU, not GPU...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

littlestymaar 3y ago

This is about CPU, son AMD vs Intel, not GPU for which AMD is competing against Nvidia

paulmd 3y ago
the positive/negative parasocial relationships people have with AMD and NVIDIA (respectively) borders on "splitting" in the personality-disorder sense. AMD represents everything wholesome and good about computing and nvidia represents everything bad and malicious about computing, to a lot of people. And when they see one of the brands they just have to hammer that post button to signal their virtue.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  >AMD represents everything wholesome and good about computing Must be an opinion of someone who has never had to deal with AMD customer support.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  You're reading way too far into someone getting the context wrong.
  - izacus 3y ago
    Nah, these off topic rants are pretty much there in every single topic here. Every AMD/nVidia article has bunch of people just ranting without even trying to read the topic.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      When the topic is explicitly a popularity contest, talking about which one is better is pretty reasonable.
      - izacus 3y ago
        No, ranting how nVidia kicked your dog because your favorite screensaver doesn't work in a topic about CUDA computation on Linux is not reasonable.

aero-glide2 3y ago

This is about CPU, not GPU. Also dealing with AMD GPU drivers is just as difficult.

atq2119 3y ago
AMD GPU drivers come with Linux distributions by default. There's literally nothing you have to do, unless your GPU is very recent.
- dietr1ch 3y ago
  My gpu is quite recent and the only thing I had to do was make sure I'm running a recent kernel.
  - mort96 3y ago
    I also had to make sure I'm running a decent enough MESA and a recent enough llvm and a recent enough linux-firmware. It's not trivial. But if you're on a distro with a recent enough version of those things, it Just Works. I do wish distros like Ubuntu were more on the ball with regards to hardware support though. Ideally, someone running an up to date Ubuntu LTS should have a system which just works with new AMD hardware within at most a few weeks. It's currently a matter of many many months.
margalabargala 3y ago
> Also dealing with AMD GPU drivers is just as difficult. This was true ten years ago, and remains true only for hardware dating back to that time period. My old HD7850 is a royal pain to get running properly on a modern distro. For any remotely recent GPU that's supported by what's built into the linux kernel, it's pretty much seamless. There are no specific driver updates to deal with, which model of card does not matter, etc. It's all just built into the kernel.
- yoshamano 3y ago
  This has been my experience with my Radeon RX 6750 XT and Manjaro. I didn't have to do anything and it just works. I use Steam/Proton to game and that just works as well.

michaelmrose 3y ago

Do you game on a laptop? The only thing you do with Nvidia on desktop is $install-cmd nvidia

severino 3y ago

> Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users Actually, Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years. You remember fglrx and that stuff? Well, Nvidia worked.

johnny22 3y ago
yep. nvidia was the only choice back then. I don't see how folks have forgoten that. But, now it's all AMD for me, because amd doesn't require a closed source driver or userspace. Apparently that will change in the next year or so though. It'll be interesting to see how the open nvidia stuff compares in the future.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mort96 3y ago
  Nvidia will always require a closed source userspace, the only part they've opened is the kernel side. And the new kernel driver only works for 2000 series or newer. But it's still a pretty huge step in the right direction, even though it won't be as nice as AMD's fully open source and upstreamed driver.
- silisili 3y ago
  Some people have no idea how nice it is now compared to 15 or 20 years ago. I took an NVME out of an Intel machine, threw it into an AMD machine, booted it, and everything just worked, graphics included. No weird network drivers to track down, sound card drivers, proprietary graphics or even xf86- stuff needed.
mort96 3y ago
This was me. I had a Radeon 290x. It worked alright, but fglrx was terrible (and the config UI was the only non-English app in my system, it didn't respect locale settings), and when AMDGPU first arrived, it was a horribly buggy flickering mess. I upgraded to a 1080Ti after high-end Vega failed to materialise, and nvidia's drivers kind of just worked, especially on Ubuntu (they were proprietary of course, but so was fglrx). It wasn't really before Wayland started being a serious option that nvidia started to become a problem. I've now upgraded to a Radeon 7000 series GPU, and the open source drivers are a breeze and Wayland works much better than it does under nvidia's drivers. But I maintain that at least during the GTX 900 series through probably the 2000 series, nvidia was the only reasonable choice, even on Linux, especially if you wanted anything mid-range or above.

shams93 3y ago

Yeah what I found with these recent generation combo of nvidia + intel while powerful and while I can install linux, had issues with serious over heating causing a shut down where the nvidia driver was causing heat issues on the laptop, once switching back to windows 11, no more thermal issues.

treprinum 3y ago

Maybe my experience is vastly different, but Nvidia just works. I have a laptop with 3080, a Threadripper with 2x3090 and an Intel with a 4090 and A6000 and it works without any fuss in Linux (I mostly use it for Deep Learning but sometimes gaming as well).

pizza234 3y ago
> but Nvidia just works Not really. On some/several/many Nvidia cards (I had a few), one can't even boot with a stock Ubuntu CD, because Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD. AMD's drivers are at least open source and integrated in the kernel. On the other hand though, having owned several Nvidia and AMD cards, I didn't find any brand to be noticeably more stable than the other (each one had issues).
- charcircuit 3y ago
  That sounds like a bug with Ubuntu not having the proper drivers.
- SadTrombone 3y ago
  > Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD. In my opinion an open-source driver not written by Nvidia and an Ubuntu ISO not packaged by Nvidia aren't indicators of Nvidia "just work"ing or not. There are many distros where Nvidia drivers come installed out of the box.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    In my opinion, formed from over two decades of Linux, a piece of hardware having a libre driver written for it is the exact indicator of what can be relied upon to "just work". The last proprietary graphics driver I ran was fglrx for a laptop R1400. One day AMD/ATI just straight up removed that card from the driver, with the newer driver being required for the newer X, unilaterally declaring my laptop obsolete. Never again. (where I can help it. Mobile is obviously a forced-obsolescence dumpster fire)

gtirloni 3y ago

I installed the official drivers on Fedora 38 and Debian 12 lately and had zero problems with it. DKMS just rebuilds them after each kernel upgrade. Chrome and other stuff still don't work great but is that NVIDIA's fault? Honest question, I don't know.

renewiltord 3y ago

I’ve stuck to nvidia for years and it’s reliable on Linux. Needs proprietary drivers for full performance. I don’t think they’re actively hostile since they have drivers available. It used to be that you struggled to get acceleration. Nvidia drivers were the only reliable way. I had an ATI GPU too and drivers were not as good on Linux. Article is about CPU, though, and both manufacturers seem comparable. I have Ryzen for price/performance.

lom 3y ago

It’s CPU?

idonotknowwhy 3y ago

I've had nothing but issues with AMD on Linux. 7970,280x,rx580 and vega64. All of them had horrible bugs for what I was doing and amd opengl sucks. I eventually got sick of all the hard lock bugs running emulators, and the driver devs not wanting to fix it because Nintendo was their customer. Then I switched to nvidia and everything just works with similar performance to windows. Unless installing the drivers is too hard, nvidia is the best was to game on Linux

code_duck 3y ago
Installing the drivers is easy, but that doesn’t mean they work immediately. I got a fairly old computer a couple of years ago and put an RTX 3070 in it… I tried installing several distros and each of them would go through the install fine, then give a blank screen when I tried to boot. I tried all sorts of configuration and driver installations, both free and offical NVidia. I finally got one to work like it should, but it took about 10 days of messing with it.
anonbanker 3y ago
Spoilers: he was trying to install them all on Ubuntu 16.04

MBCook 3y ago

This is CPUs, not GPUs.

andrewstuart 3y ago

>> Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users. Nvidia has excellent Linux drivers.

Benanov 3y ago
Both these statements can be true. Their drivers can be excellent but try to do anything with your Linux machine after the Nvidia drivers are installed and you run into trouble. Ubuntu release upgrades used to be impossible w/ Nvidia drivers. You'd get into a situation where you'd boot into a text-only console, but because nvidia didn't do kms you'd get 40x25 with the first few characters off the screen. Now I buy AMD.
- freeone3000 3y ago
  New kernel means driver reinstall, always. Apt now runs the dkms reinstall for you.

xethos 3y ago

I agree, but the article is about Intel vs AMD, not AMD vs nVidia marketshare among Linux gamers.

itvision 3y ago

> Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users. Citations and facts needed. Also, please enlighten us why NVIDIA owes Linux or its users anything. Please. Just take it slow. > The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers. NVIDIA [Linux] drivers have been the staple of quality and features for the past two decades sans rare f ups, such as 3090 Ti's dying (took them a week to fix) and frequents BSODs on Windows Vista (due to a completely new driver model which took them quite some time to polish). I'm pretty sure I've dealt with NVIDIA a lot more than you've ever done but I cannot relate to this statement at all despite being an NVIDIA Linux user for over two decades. I wouldn't claim that you're lying through your teeth, but I'm pretty sure that this post has a ton of emotions and very little essence. I'm not surprised to see hatred towards the company but in absolute most cases it doesn't mean anything.

anonbanker 3y ago
If you've been a 20-year Nvidia Linux user like I have, you'll have countless horror stories of system upgrades and kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop. How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed? How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again? How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason? If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago.
- itvision 3y ago
  > If you've been a 20-year Nvidia Linux user like I have, you'll have countless horror stories of system upgrades and kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop. I've had zero "system breaks", neither has anyone who used a distro supplied driver package. And if you installed from the official SH file, well, you did it at your own risk and you had to understand what you were doing. In short, you're lying. > kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop. Again, didn't affect those who used a distro supplied package. Those who used the installer patched the kernel, which I've done countless times but over the past four years I've done it zero times. In short you're lying again. > How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed? Never ever happened to me or anyone who I know. Show me actual fixed bug reports where NVIDIA is blamed for breaking the DM or bust. I think you're now lying again. Xorg support in NVIDIA drivers have been stellar aside from older GPUs and older drivers not supporting newer Xorg releases but then HW companies do not owe you infinite support. People who expect their more than 15 year old GPUs to work with modern OS'es and support all the features are lunatics. > How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again? What?? Did you come up with this BS in your dream? I've been using NVIDIA since late 90s. Never ever in my entire life I've got the Xorg config file lost. In fact, and here's you lying again (!) Xorg reads this file and closes it right away. It doesn't keep it open. Under no conditions this file could have been lost now or ever. And Xorg has used auto configuration for almost a decade now if I'm not mistaken, so there's no xorg.conf file to speak of. I have a small file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d to enable CoolBits in the NVIDIA driver, that's it. > How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason? You are making stuff up. Again, there will be no bug reports, citations, anything. > If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago. I've been using NVIDIA since Riva TNT2, thank you very much. And the list is a lot longer than you could imagine including MX440, FX 5600 (it was horrible), GeForce 6100 (integrated GPU), 7600 GT, 8800 GT, GTX 660, GTX 1060 and now GTX 1660 Ti. I don't remember your nickname on nvnews.net (do you even know about this website? nah, I don't think so) - NVIDIA's Linux support forums in the late 90s/early 00s which tells to me everything. Almost everything you wrote (sans occasional kernel incompatibilities which did _not_ affected normal people) is just pure made up crap. I can show you nvnews.net and forums.developer.nvidia.com threads with actual issues but you've listed none. I'm the person who filed this https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/511 https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/511 and it affects countless people, mainly Turing users. I know how none other than kernel hackers _intentionally_ broke NVIDIA drivers recently by breaking EFI console, a malicious patch which was later reversed because it affected more than just NVIDIA drivers. And I also frequent kernel bugzilla and AMD/Intel bug trackers. They have far more serious bug reports. AMD drivers for certain GPUs have been broken for a large number of people in the past three "stable" releases, including 6.3.9, 10 and 11: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-9b7e08901a#comment-3066778 https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-9b7e0890... AMD open source drivers have become semi-decent maybe in the past two years at most. Oh, except, RocM. Intel fares better but they are not strangers to deal breaker regressions. No one is perfect, and trying to say that NVIDIA is hostile to Linux while offering a high quality driver is either malevolent or just mean but it's definitely not true at all. I know this crap dearly, sorry.