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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

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

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