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Can you give a specific example of what's better about the AMD experience on Linux?

by cout 3y ago

neurostimulant 3y ago
Wayland is less buggy on AMD and Intel.
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  This^ and also there’s always some driver issue on linux for Nvidia cards. It’s one of those things you set it up and then never want to touch it because if you update it. It’s flipping a coin on if you will spend the next few hours trying to figure out what’s wrong.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    I keep hearing complaints about NVIDIA driver issues under Linux, so they must be real. Nevertheless, I have used for twenty years many different NVIDIA cards under Linux, both GeForce and Quadro models, on many different desktop and laptop computers. I have never seen any problem with the NVIDIA drivers and libraries, everything has worked fine after installation, without needing any special action beyond choosing to install the NVIDIA software. The same was also true under FreeBSD. The only exception to this was some years ago, on a laptop with NVIDIA Optimus switchable GPUs, where I have lost a couple of days until succeeding to configure how to select between the Intel GPU and the NVIDIA GPU. I also have some AMD GPUs, older models which still had great FP64 performance, so they are used for computational applications, but with those I had greater problems under Linux, when used with many monitors. Therefore whether problems with the Linux NVIDIA drivers are encountered must be dependent on complex combinations of hardware and software, so it is impossible to predict whether they will be encountered or not. Unexpected problems may always happen with any piece of hardware under an open-source operating system, because the manufacturers typically do not provide technical documentation like they did before 1995 and most of them test their hardware only with Windows. NVIDIA certainly provides much better software support for Linux and FreeBSD than the majority of the hardware vendors. So my point is that it is incorrect to attempt to discourage the Linux users to use NVIDIA due to supposed driver problems, because many of them, perhaps most of them will never encounter any problem. Only the Intel GPUs can be said to have better Linux support, and they also have the best GPU technical documentation, much better than that of AMD. While NVIDIA has the worst documentation for their hardware, they have excellent documentation for the huge amount of software that they provide freely for their GPUs under Linux. What is wrong with NVIDIA is neither their software support for Linux nor the documentation for that software, but their pricing policy that always seems based on a greediness that is excessive even for a profit-oriented company.
    - butterknife 3y ago
      You used NVIDIA cards for twenty years and never run into an issue where the mainline driver stopped supporting your GPU and you had to manually download community hosted legacy driver family on every kernel upgrade? Gets old quick...
      - adrian_b 3y ago
        While I have retired the older cards, up to Kepler, I am still using a Maxwell GPU from 9 years ago and it is still well supported, like also my other Pascal, Volta and Turing GPUs, none of which is new. There might have been NVIDIA GPUs which have been supported for less than 10 years, but I never happened to have one of those. I have been using mostly Gentoo, and I never had to do anything besides "emerge nvidia-drivers", with the exception of the case that I have already mentioned with the laptop Optimus configuration, which required installing extra programs besides the official NVIDIA drivers. In all these twenty years I have used only Linux on all desktops and laptops, both at home and at work, and I have also written various OpenGL and CUDA programs, so I have used the NVIDIA cards in many different circumstances, without encountering problems. Some years ago, I was hoping that I would be able to get rid of the NVIDIA GPUs and use only AMD GPUs, which had a much better computational performance per dollar. Unfortunately, AMD has split their GPUs into RDNA GPUs that are good only for gaming and CDNA GPUs that are much too expensive for small companies or individuals, so they no longer make any GPU model that could be an upgrade for my old AMD GPUs, so the only choice remains to buy overpriced NVIDIA GPUs, unless the next Intel generation of GPUs will become more competitive for computational tasks. At least Intel makes a credible effort to compete with CUDA, with their oneAPI environment.
    - knotty66 3y ago
      With the prevalence of Wayland, I don't think it's correct to say that most Linux users will never encounter problems with NVIDIA. Things have improved recently but Intel and AMD are still way ahead when it comes to that.
      - adrian_b 3y ago
dralley 3y ago
The open source drivers for Nvidia have sucked for years, meaning you need to use the proprietary drivers. The proprietary drivers frequently break on kernel updates and have historically been problematic to use in combination with Wayland.
- NBJack 3y ago
  Ouch. This hurts, and I amdit to being an NVIDIA fan, but it is very true. And may your maker help you if you want to do some HW accelerated ML but accidentally upgrade one of the many NVIDIA components (driver, CUDA, CuDNN) to a version not compatible with that one key Python package.
Karliss 3y ago
Note that my Nvidia experience is roughly 5 years old. Some things might have changed during that time. When I was using Nvidia GPU my experience that 50% after a system update which included kernel update, the Nvidia kmod didn't properly rebuild resulting in graphical interface completely non working next time I booted the system. In such situations I had to switch to terminal and enter a couple of commands to ensure the Nvidia driver is also properly updated and the glue layer between kernel and the driver rebuilt. Most of the time that helped but occasionally it didn't and I had to stay on previous kernel version for a week until the issues got solved. That was a couple of years ago with fedora. On a different distro with less frequent kernel updates and Nvidia drivers being repackaged by the maintainers of distro instead of third party repo like rpmfusion, or a bigger distro that Nvidia tests ahead of time, the experience might have been slightly more smooth. Currently with AMD open source driver's that's not an issue since the drivers are part of kernel so everything just works and always has compatible versions. I can install any recent distro and it will just work out of the box. Last year Nvidia open sourced some parts of their driver, but not all of it (it still depends on large user space binary blobs), it might slightly help with the practical aspects of problem above. But I don't know whether distros embraced it and did it actually help (I dropped Nvidia before that). I don't disagree that it's at least partially more of the fault of Linux kernel for not having stable API, not so much AMD or Nvidia. But for the end user it doesn't matter whose fault it is. AMD chose to play by the rules of Linux, which makes much better end user experience better. All of this applies only to graphic driver part, GPU compute is a completely different story. Another big part as others mentioned is wayland support. For a long time Nvidia drivers dindn't support it at all due to not providing certain interface. From what I understand currently it works on the major desktop environments like Gnome and KDE, but due to them adding support for Nvidia specific interface not the other way around. So it still doesn't work on more niche desktop environments which use the common interface supported by rest of drivers. ~12 years ago, before AMD made their official open source drivers situation was completely different. The choice then for AMD was between non official open source drivers which had 50% performance but worked correctly and the closed source AMD drivers that were 2x faster (when they worked) but otherwise buggy. Compared to that Nvidia closed source drivers worked.
johndough 3y ago
On Kubuntu 22.04 with an RTX 30*0, you have to downgrade NVIDIA drivers to version 515 or the system won't boot. Has been like this since launch. This is especially annoying since if you want to install any other NVIDIA software, the installer will try to update the driver version and break the system again. A friend of mine has a similar issue on Ubuntu where the system only boots 2 out of 3 times. I also recall having similar issues almost every time when I installed systems with NVIDIA GPUs in the last decade. Checking the forums, other people are having similar issues. https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/no-gui-or-display-after-install-the-nvidia-driver-535-on-ubuntu-20-04/260521 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/no-gui-or-display-afte... https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/no-display-output-when-nvidia-driver-installed-ubuntu-22-04-2/256756 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/no-display-output-when...
- genewitch 3y ago
  i've been using 520 for quite a while on ubuntu 22; i don't have any reason to upgrade versions as everything works well enough.

Can you give a specific example of what's better about the AMD experience on Linux?

by cout 3y ago

Can you give a specific example of what's better about the AMD experience on Linux?

neurostimulant 3y ago

Wayland is less buggy on AMD and Intel.

throwaway2990 3y ago
This^ and also there’s always some driver issue on linux for Nvidia cards. It’s one of those things you set it up and then never want to touch it because if you update it. It’s flipping a coin on if you will spend the next few hours trying to figure out what’s wrong.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  I keep hearing complaints about NVIDIA driver issues under Linux, so they must be real. Nevertheless, I have used for twenty years many different NVIDIA cards under Linux, both GeForce and Quadro models, on many different desktop and laptop computers. I have never seen any problem with the NVIDIA drivers and libraries, everything has worked fine after installation, without needing any special action beyond choosing to install the NVIDIA software. The same was also true under FreeBSD. The only exception to this was some years ago, on a laptop with NVIDIA Optimus switchable GPUs, where I have lost a couple of days until succeeding to configure how to select between the Intel GPU and the NVIDIA GPU. I also have some AMD GPUs, older models which still had great FP64 performance, so they are used for computational applications, but with those I had greater problems under Linux, when used with many monitors. Therefore whether problems with the Linux NVIDIA drivers are encountered must be dependent on complex combinations of hardware and software, so it is impossible to predict whether they will be encountered or not. Unexpected problems may always happen with any piece of hardware under an open-source operating system, because the manufacturers typically do not provide technical documentation like they did before 1995 and most of them test their hardware only with Windows. NVIDIA certainly provides much better software support for Linux and FreeBSD than the majority of the hardware vendors. So my point is that it is incorrect to attempt to discourage the Linux users to use NVIDIA due to supposed driver problems, because many of them, perhaps most of them will never encounter any problem. Only the Intel GPUs can be said to have better Linux support, and they also have the best GPU technical documentation, much better than that of AMD. While NVIDIA has the worst documentation for their hardware, they have excellent documentation for the huge amount of software that they provide freely for their GPUs under Linux. What is wrong with NVIDIA is neither their software support for Linux nor the documentation for that software, but their pricing policy that always seems based on a greediness that is excessive even for a profit-oriented company.
  - butterknife 3y ago
    You used NVIDIA cards for twenty years and never run into an issue where the mainline driver stopped supporting your GPU and you had to manually download community hosted legacy driver family on every kernel upgrade? Gets old quick...
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      While I have retired the older cards, up to Kepler, I am still using a Maxwell GPU from 9 years ago and it is still well supported, like also my other Pascal, Volta and Turing GPUs, none of which is new. There might have been NVIDIA GPUs which have been supported for less than 10 years, but I never happened to have one of those. I have been using mostly Gentoo, and I never had to do anything besides "emerge nvidia-drivers", with the exception of the case that I have already mentioned with the laptop Optimus configuration, which required installing extra programs besides the official NVIDIA drivers. In all these twenty years I have used only Linux on all desktops and laptops, both at home and at work, and I have also written various OpenGL and CUDA programs, so I have used the NVIDIA cards in many different circumstances, without encountering problems. Some years ago, I was hoping that I would be able to get rid of the NVIDIA GPUs and use only AMD GPUs, which had a much better computational performance per dollar. Unfortunately, AMD has split their GPUs into RDNA GPUs that are good only for gaming and CDNA GPUs that are much too expensive for small companies or individuals, so they no longer make any GPU model that could be an upgrade for my old AMD GPUs, so the only choice remains to buy overpriced NVIDIA GPUs, unless the next Intel generation of GPUs will become more competitive for computational tasks. At least Intel makes a credible effort to compete with CUDA, with their oneAPI environment.
  - knotty66 3y ago
    With the prevalence of Wayland, I don't think it's correct to say that most Linux users will never encounter problems with NVIDIA. Things have improved recently but Intel and AMD are still way ahead when it comes to that.
    - adrian_b 3y ago

dralley 3y ago

The open source drivers for Nvidia have sucked for years, meaning you need to use the proprietary drivers. The proprietary drivers frequently break on kernel updates and have historically been problematic to use in combination with Wayland.

NBJack 3y ago
Ouch. This hurts, and I amdit to being an NVIDIA fan, but it is very true. And may your maker help you if you want to do some HW accelerated ML but accidentally upgrade one of the many NVIDIA components (driver, CUDA, CuDNN) to a version not compatible with that one key Python package.

Karliss 3y ago

Note that my Nvidia experience is roughly 5 years old. Some things might have changed during that time. When I was using Nvidia GPU my experience that 50% after a system update which included kernel update, the Nvidia kmod didn't properly rebuild resulting in graphical interface completely non working next time I booted the system. In such situations I had to switch to terminal and enter a couple of commands to ensure the Nvidia driver is also properly updated and the glue layer between kernel and the driver rebuilt. Most of the time that helped but occasionally it didn't and I had to stay on previous kernel version for a week until the issues got solved. That was a couple of years ago with fedora. On a different distro with less frequent kernel updates and Nvidia drivers being repackaged by the maintainers of distro instead of third party repo like rpmfusion, or a bigger distro that Nvidia tests ahead of time, the experience might have been slightly more smooth. Currently with AMD open source driver's that's not an issue since the drivers are part of kernel so everything just works and always has compatible versions. I can install any recent distro and it will just work out of the box. Last year Nvidia open sourced some parts of their driver, but not all of it (it still depends on large user space binary blobs), it might slightly help with the practical aspects of problem above. But I don't know whether distros embraced it and did it actually help (I dropped Nvidia before that). I don't disagree that it's at least partially more of the fault of Linux kernel for not having stable API, not so much AMD or Nvidia. But for the end user it doesn't matter whose fault it is. AMD chose to play by the rules of Linux, which makes much better end user experience better. All of this applies only to graphic driver part, GPU compute is a completely different story. Another big part as others mentioned is wayland support. For a long time Nvidia drivers dindn't support it at all due to not providing certain interface. From what I understand currently it works on the major desktop environments like Gnome and KDE, but due to them adding support for Nvidia specific interface not the other way around. So it still doesn't work on more niche desktop environments which use the common interface supported by rest of drivers. ~12 years ago, before AMD made their official open source drivers situation was completely different. The choice then for AMD was between non official open source drivers which had 50% performance but worked correctly and the closed source AMD drivers that were 2x faster (when they worked) but otherwise buggy. Compared to that Nvidia closed source drivers worked.

johndough 3y ago

On Kubuntu 22.04 with an RTX 30*0, you have to downgrade NVIDIA drivers to version 515 or the system won't boot. Has been like this since launch. This is especially annoying since if you want to install any other NVIDIA software, the installer will try to update the driver version and break the system again. A friend of mine has a similar issue on Ubuntu where the system only boots 2 out of 3 times. I also recall having similar issues almost every time when I installed systems with NVIDIA GPUs in the last decade. Checking the forums, other people are having similar issues. https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/no-gui-or-display-after-install-the-nvidia-driver-535-on-ubuntu-20-04/260521 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/no-gui-or-display-afte... https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/no-display-output-when-nvidia-driver-installed-ubuntu-22-04-2/256756 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/no-display-output-when...

genewitch 3y ago
i've been using 520 for quite a while on ubuntu 22; i don't have any reason to upgrade versions as everything works well enough.