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How is the NVIDIA driver situation on Linux these days? I built a new desktop with an AMD GPU since I didn't want to deal with all the weirdness of closed sourc

How is the NVIDIA driver situation on Linux these days? I built a new desktop with an AMD GPU since I didn't want to deal with all the weirdness of closed source or lacking/obsolete open source drivers.

tadasv 2y ago
great. rtx 4090 works out of the box after installing drivers from non-free. That's on debian bookworm.
jppittma 2y ago
4070 worked out of the box on my arch system. I used the closed source drivers and X11 and I've not encountered a single problem. My prediction is that it will continue to improve if only because people want to run nvidia on workstations.
jcranmer 2y ago
I built my new-ish computer with an AMD GPU because I trusted in-kernel drivers better than out-of-kernel DKMS drivers. That said, my previous experience with the DKMS driver stuff hasn't been bad. If you use Nvidia's proprietary driver stack, then things should generally be fine. The worst issues are that Nvidia has (historically, at least; it might be different for newer cards) refused to implement some graphics features that everybody else uses, which means that you basically need entirely separate codepaths for Nvidia in window managers, and some of them have basically said "fuck no" to doing that.
mepian 2y ago
The current stable proprietary driver is a nightmare on Wayland with my 3070, constant flickering and stuttering everywhere. Apparently the upcoming version 555 is much better, I'm sticking with X11 until it comes out. I never tried the open-source one yet, not sure if it supports my GPU at all.
- llmblockchain 2y ago
  I have a 3070 on X and it has been great.
  - levkk 2y ago
    Same setup here. Multiple displays don't work well for me. One of the displays doesn't often get detected after resuming screen saver.
    - llmblockchain 2y ago
      I have two monitors connected to the 3070 and it works well. The only issue I had was suspending, the GPU would "fall of the bus" and not get its power back when the PC woke up. I had to add the kernel line "pcie_aspm=off" to prevent the GPU from falling asleep. So... not perfect, but it works.
      - josephg 2y ago
        Huh. I’m using 2 monitors connected to a 4090 on Linux mint - which is still using X11. It works flawlessly, including DPI scaling. Wake from sleep is fine too. I haven’t tried wayland yet. Sounds like it might be time soon given other comments in this thread.
- misterbishop 2y ago
  this is resolved in 555 (currently running 555.58.02). my asus zephyrus g15 w/ 3060 is looking real good on Fedora 40. there's still optimizations needed around clocking, power, and thermals. but the graphics presentation layer has no issues on wayland. that's with hybrid/optimus/prime switching, which has NEVER worked seamlessly for me on any laptop on linux going back to 2010. gnome window animations remain snappy and not glitchy while running a game. i'm getting 60fps+ running baldurs gate 3 @ 1440p on the low preset.
  - robviren 2y ago
    Had similar experience with my Legion 5i 3070 with Wayland and Nvidia 555, but my HDMI out is all screwed up now of course. Working on 550. One step forward and one step back.
    - misterbishop 2y ago
      is there a mux switch?
- bcrescimanno 2y ago
  The 555 version is the current version. It was officially released on June 27. https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-555.58-Linux-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-555.58-Linux-Driver
  - JasonSage 2y ago
    In defense of the parent, upcoming can still be a relative term, albeit a bit misleading. For example: I'm running the 550 drivers still because my upstream nixos-unstable doesn't have 555 for me yet.
    - mepian 2y ago
      Yep, I'm on openSUSE Tumbleweed, and it's not rolled out there yet. I would rather wait than update my drivers out-of-band.
    - SushiHippie 2y ago
      The versions that nixos provides are based on the files in this repo https://github.com/aaronp24/nvidia-versions https://github.com/aaronp24/nvidia-versions See: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9355fa86e6f27422963132c2c9aeedb0fb963d93/pkgs/os-specific/linux/nvidia-x11/default.nix#L30 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9355fa86e6f27422963132... You could also opt to use the latest driver instead of stable: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nvidia https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nvidia
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - mananaysiempre 2y ago
      > nixos-unstable doesn't have 555 Version 555.58.02 is under “latest” in nixos-unstable as of about three weeks ago[1]. (Somebody should check with qyliss if she knows the PR tracker is dead... But the last nixos-unstable bump was two days ago, so it’s there.) [1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/4e15c4a8ad30c02d6c2614565600865aec80edca https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/4e15c4a8ad30c02d6c26...
- gmokki 2y ago
  I switched to Wayland 10 years ago when it became an option ok Fedora. First thing I had to do was to drop NVIDIA and switch to Intel GPU, and past 5 years to AMD GPU. Makes a big difference if the upstream kernel is supported. Maybe NVIDIA drivers have kind of worked on 12 month old kernels that Ubuntu on average uses.
anon291 2y ago
I've literally never had an issue in decades of using NVIDIA and linux. They're closed source, but the drivers work very consistently for me. NVIDIA's just the only option if you want something actually good and to run ML workloads as well.
- sqeaky 2y ago
  > but the drivers work very consistently for me The problem with comments like this is that you never know if you will be me or you on your graphics card or laptop. I have tried nvidia a few times and kept getting burnt. AMD just works. I don't get the fastest ML machine, but I am just a tinkerer there and OpenCL works fine for my little toy apps and my 7900XTX blazes through every wine game. If you need it professionally than you need it, warts an all. For any casual user that 10% extra gaming performance needs to weighed against reliability.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    It also depends heavily on the user. A mechanic might say "This car has never given me a problem" because the mechanic doesn't consider cleaning an idle bypass circuit or adjusting valve clearances to be a "problem". To 99% percent of the population though, those are expensive and annoying problems because they have no idea what those words even mean, much less the ability to troubleshoot, diagnose, and repair.
    - chasil 2y ago
      If you use a search engine for "Torvalds Nvidia" you will discern a certain attitude towards Nvidia as a corporation and its products. This might provide you a suggestion that alternate manufacturers should be considered. I have confirmed this to be the case on Google and Bing, so DuckDuckGo and Startpage will also exhibit this phenomena.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        An opinion on support from over ten years ago is not a very strong suggestion.
art0rz 2y ago
I've been running Arch with KDE under Wayland on two different laptops both with NVIDIA GPUs using proprietary drivers for years and have not run into issues. Maybe I'm lucky? It's been flawless for me.
- lyu07282 2y ago
  The experiences always vary quite a lot, it depends so much on what you do with it. For example discord doesn't support screen sharing with Wayland, it's just one small example but those can add up over time. Another example is display rotation which was broken in kde for a long time (recently fixed).
green-salt 2y ago
Whatever pop_os uses has been quite stable for my 4070.
- tormeh 2y ago
  Pop uses X by default because of Nvidia.
segmondy 2y ago
plug, install then play, I got 3 different Nvidia GPU sets and all running without any issue, nothing crazy to do but follow installation instructions.
- anonym29 2y ago
  To some of us, running any closed source software in userland qualifies as quite crazy indeed.
DaoVeles 2y ago
I have never had an issue with them. That said I typically go mid range on cards so they are usually hardened architecture due to a year or two of being in the high end.
mathfailure 2y ago
Depends on the version of drivers: 550 version results into black screen (you have to kill and restart X server) after waking up from sleep. 535 version doesn't have this bug. Don't know about 555. Also tearing is a bitch. Still. Even with ForceCompositionPipeline.
drdaeman 2y ago
3090 owner here. Wayland is even worse mess than it normally is. Used to flicker real bad before 555.58.02, less so with the latest driver - but still has some glitches with games. A bunch of older Electron apps still fail to render anything and require hardware acceleration disabled. I gave up trying to make it all work - can't get rid of all the flicker and drawing issues, plus Wayland seems to be a real pain in the ass with HiDPI displays. X11 sort of works, but I had to entirely disable DPMS or one of my monitors never comes back online after going to sleep. I thought it was my KVM messing up, but that happened even with a direct connection... no idea what's going on there. CUDA works fine, save for the regular version compatibility hiccups.
- senectus1 2y ago
  4070ti super here, X11 is fine, i have zero issues. Wayland is mostly fine, though i get some windowframe glitches when maxing them to the monitor and a another issue that i'm pretty sure is wayland but it has obnly happened a couple of times and it locks the whole device up. I cant prove it yet.
devwastaken 2y ago
KDE plasma 6 + Nvidia beta 555 works well. Have to make .desktop files to launch some applications explicitly Wayland.
adrian_b 2y ago
I am not using Wayland and I do not have any intention to use it, therefore I do not care for any problems caused by Wayland not supporting NVIDIA and demanding that NVIDIA must support Wayland. I am using only Linux or FreeBSD on all my laptop, desktop or server computers. On desktop and server computers I did not ever have the slightest difficulty with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, either for OpenGL or for CUDA applications or for video decoding/encoding or for multiple monitor support, with high resolution and high color depth, on either Gentoo/Funtoo Linux or FreeBSD, during the last two decades. I also have AMD GPUs, which I use for compute applications (because they are older models, which still had FP64 support). For graphics applications they frequently had annoying bugs, unlike NVIDIA (however my AMD GPUs have been older models, preceding RDNA, which might be better supported by the open-source AMD drivers). The only computers on which I had problems with NVIDIA on Linux were those laptops that used the NVIDIA Optimus method of coexistence with the Intel integrated GPUs. Many years ago I have needed a couple of days to properly configure the drivers and additional software so that the NVIDIA GPU was selected when desired, instead of the Intel iGPU. I do not know if any laptops with NVIDIA Optimus still exist. The laptops that I bought later had video outputs directly from the NVIDIA GPU, so there was no difference between them and desktops and the NVIDIA drivers worked flawlessly. Both on Gentoo/Funtoo Linux and FreeBSD I never had to do anything else but to give the driver update command and everything worked fine. Moreover, NVIDIA has always provided a nice GUI application "NVIDIA X Server Settings", which provides a lot of useful information and which makes very easy any configuration tasks, like setting the desired positions of multiple monitors. A few years ago there was nothing equivalent for the AMD or Intel GPU drivers, but that might have changed meanwhile.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
My experience with an AMD iGPU on Linux was so bad that my next laptop will be Intel. Horrible instability to the point where I could reliably crash my machine by using Google Maps for a few minutes, on both Chrome and Firefox. It got fixed eventually - with the next Ubuntu release, so I had a computer where I was afraid to use anything with WebGL for half a year.
littlecranky67 2y ago
I got my nvidia 1060 back then during the crypto crysis when the price of AMD GPUs were inflated due to miners. Hesitant and scepital about Linux support, I upgraded the same machine with that GPU since 2016 von Ubuntu 14.04, to 18.04 and now 24.04 - without any nvidia driver issues anytime whatsoever. When I read about issues with nvidias drivers, it is mostly people with rare distro or rolling release ones, with changing kernel versions very frequently and failure to recompile with the binary drivers. For LTS distros you will likely have no issues.

tadasv 2y ago

great. rtx 4090 works out of the box after installing drivers from non-free. That's on debian bookworm.

jppittma 2y ago

4070 worked out of the box on my arch system. I used the closed source drivers and X11 and I've not encountered a single problem. My prediction is that it will continue to improve if only because people want to run nvidia on workstations.

jcranmer 2y ago

I built my new-ish computer with an AMD GPU because I trusted in-kernel drivers better than out-of-kernel DKMS drivers. That said, my previous experience with the DKMS driver stuff hasn't been bad. If you use Nvidia's proprietary driver stack, then things should generally be fine. The worst issues are that Nvidia has (historically, at least; it might be different for newer cards) refused to implement some graphics features that everybody else uses, which means that you basically need entirely separate codepaths for Nvidia in window managers, and some of them have basically said "fuck no" to doing that.

mepian 2y ago

The current stable proprietary driver is a nightmare on Wayland with my 3070, constant flickering and stuttering everywhere. Apparently the upcoming version 555 is much better, I'm sticking with X11 until it comes out. I never tried the open-source one yet, not sure if it supports my GPU at all.

llmblockchain 2y ago
I have a 3070 on X and it has been great.
- levkk 2y ago
  Same setup here. Multiple displays don't work well for me. One of the displays doesn't often get detected after resuming screen saver.
  - llmblockchain 2y ago
    I have two monitors connected to the 3070 and it works well. The only issue I had was suspending, the GPU would "fall of the bus" and not get its power back when the PC woke up. I had to add the kernel line "pcie_aspm=off" to prevent the GPU from falling asleep. So... not perfect, but it works.
    - josephg 2y ago
      Huh. I’m using 2 monitors connected to a 4090 on Linux mint - which is still using X11. It works flawlessly, including DPI scaling. Wake from sleep is fine too. I haven’t tried wayland yet. Sounds like it might be time soon given other comments in this thread.
misterbishop 2y ago
this is resolved in 555 (currently running 555.58.02). my asus zephyrus g15 w/ 3060 is looking real good on Fedora 40. there's still optimizations needed around clocking, power, and thermals. but the graphics presentation layer has no issues on wayland. that's with hybrid/optimus/prime switching, which has NEVER worked seamlessly for me on any laptop on linux going back to 2010. gnome window animations remain snappy and not glitchy while running a game. i'm getting 60fps+ running baldurs gate 3 @ 1440p on the low preset.
- robviren 2y ago
  Had similar experience with my Legion 5i 3070 with Wayland and Nvidia 555, but my HDMI out is all screwed up now of course. Working on 550. One step forward and one step back.
  - misterbishop 2y ago
    is there a mux switch?
bcrescimanno 2y ago
The 555 version is the current version. It was officially released on June 27. https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-555.58-Linux-Driver https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-555.58-Linux-Driver
- JasonSage 2y ago
  In defense of the parent, upcoming can still be a relative term, albeit a bit misleading. For example: I'm running the 550 drivers still because my upstream nixos-unstable doesn't have 555 for me yet.
  - mepian 2y ago
    Yep, I'm on openSUSE Tumbleweed, and it's not rolled out there yet. I would rather wait than update my drivers out-of-band.
  - SushiHippie 2y ago
    The versions that nixos provides are based on the files in this repo https://github.com/aaronp24/nvidia-versions https://github.com/aaronp24/nvidia-versions See: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9355fa86e6f27422963132c2c9aeedb0fb963d93/pkgs/os-specific/linux/nvidia-x11/default.nix#L30 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9355fa86e6f27422963132... You could also opt to use the latest driver instead of stable: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nvidia https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nvidia
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - mananaysiempre 2y ago
    > nixos-unstable doesn't have 555 Version 555.58.02 is under “latest” in nixos-unstable as of about three weeks ago[1]. (Somebody should check with qyliss if she knows the PR tracker is dead... But the last nixos-unstable bump was two days ago, so it’s there.) [1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/4e15c4a8ad30c02d6c2614565600865aec80edca https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/4e15c4a8ad30c02d6c26...
gmokki 2y ago
I switched to Wayland 10 years ago when it became an option ok Fedora. First thing I had to do was to drop NVIDIA and switch to Intel GPU, and past 5 years to AMD GPU. Makes a big difference if the upstream kernel is supported. Maybe NVIDIA drivers have kind of worked on 12 month old kernels that Ubuntu on average uses.

anon291 2y ago

I've literally never had an issue in decades of using NVIDIA and linux. They're closed source, but the drivers work very consistently for me. NVIDIA's just the only option if you want something actually good and to run ML workloads as well.

sqeaky 2y ago
> but the drivers work very consistently for me The problem with comments like this is that you never know if you will be me or you on your graphics card or laptop. I have tried nvidia a few times and kept getting burnt. AMD just works. I don't get the fastest ML machine, but I am just a tinkerer there and OpenCL works fine for my little toy apps and my 7900XTX blazes through every wine game. If you need it professionally than you need it, warts an all. For any casual user that 10% extra gaming performance needs to weighed against reliability.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  It also depends heavily on the user. A mechanic might say "This car has never given me a problem" because the mechanic doesn't consider cleaning an idle bypass circuit or adjusting valve clearances to be a "problem". To 99% percent of the population though, those are expensive and annoying problems because they have no idea what those words even mean, much less the ability to troubleshoot, diagnose, and repair.
  - chasil 2y ago
    If you use a search engine for "Torvalds Nvidia" you will discern a certain attitude towards Nvidia as a corporation and its products. This might provide you a suggestion that alternate manufacturers should be considered. I have confirmed this to be the case on Google and Bing, so DuckDuckGo and Startpage will also exhibit this phenomena.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      An opinion on support from over ten years ago is not a very strong suggestion.

art0rz 2y ago

I've been running Arch with KDE under Wayland on two different laptops both with NVIDIA GPUs using proprietary drivers for years and have not run into issues. Maybe I'm lucky? It's been flawless for me.

lyu07282 2y ago
The experiences always vary quite a lot, it depends so much on what you do with it. For example discord doesn't support screen sharing with Wayland, it's just one small example but those can add up over time. Another example is display rotation which was broken in kde for a long time (recently fixed).

green-salt 2y ago

Whatever pop_os uses has been quite stable for my 4070.

tormeh 2y ago
Pop uses X by default because of Nvidia.

segmondy 2y ago

plug, install then play, I got 3 different Nvidia GPU sets and all running without any issue, nothing crazy to do but follow installation instructions.

anonym29 2y ago
To some of us, running any closed source software in userland qualifies as quite crazy indeed.

DaoVeles 2y ago

I have never had an issue with them. That said I typically go mid range on cards so they are usually hardened architecture due to a year or two of being in the high end.

mathfailure 2y ago

Depends on the version of drivers: 550 version results into black screen (you have to kill and restart X server) after waking up from sleep. 535 version doesn't have this bug. Don't know about 555. Also tearing is a bitch. Still. Even with ForceCompositionPipeline.

drdaeman 2y ago

3090 owner here. Wayland is even worse mess than it normally is. Used to flicker real bad before 555.58.02, less so with the latest driver - but still has some glitches with games. A bunch of older Electron apps still fail to render anything and require hardware acceleration disabled. I gave up trying to make it all work - can't get rid of all the flicker and drawing issues, plus Wayland seems to be a real pain in the ass with HiDPI displays. X11 sort of works, but I had to entirely disable DPMS or one of my monitors never comes back online after going to sleep. I thought it was my KVM messing up, but that happened even with a direct connection... no idea what's going on there. CUDA works fine, save for the regular version compatibility hiccups.

senectus1 2y ago
4070ti super here, X11 is fine, i have zero issues. Wayland is mostly fine, though i get some windowframe glitches when maxing them to the monitor and a another issue that i'm pretty sure is wayland but it has obnly happened a couple of times and it locks the whole device up. I cant prove it yet.

devwastaken 2y ago

KDE plasma 6 + Nvidia beta 555 works well. Have to make .desktop files to launch some applications explicitly Wayland.

adrian_b 2y ago

I am not using Wayland and I do not have any intention to use it, therefore I do not care for any problems caused by Wayland not supporting NVIDIA and demanding that NVIDIA must support Wayland. I am using only Linux or FreeBSD on all my laptop, desktop or server computers. On desktop and server computers I did not ever have the slightest difficulty with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, either for OpenGL or for CUDA applications or for video decoding/encoding or for multiple monitor support, with high resolution and high color depth, on either Gentoo/Funtoo Linux or FreeBSD, during the last two decades. I also have AMD GPUs, which I use for compute applications (because they are older models, which still had FP64 support). For graphics applications they frequently had annoying bugs, unlike NVIDIA (however my AMD GPUs have been older models, preceding RDNA, which might be better supported by the open-source AMD drivers). The only computers on which I had problems with NVIDIA on Linux were those laptops that used the NVIDIA Optimus method of coexistence with the Intel integrated GPUs. Many years ago I have needed a couple of days to properly configure the drivers and additional software so that the NVIDIA GPU was selected when desired, instead of the Intel iGPU. I do not know if any laptops with NVIDIA Optimus still exist. The laptops that I bought later had video outputs directly from the NVIDIA GPU, so there was no difference between them and desktops and the NVIDIA drivers worked flawlessly. Both on Gentoo/Funtoo Linux and FreeBSD I never had to do anything else but to give the driver update command and everything worked fine. Moreover, NVIDIA has always provided a nice GUI application "NVIDIA X Server Settings", which provides a lot of useful information and which makes very easy any configuration tasks, like setting the desired positions of multiple monitors. A few years ago there was nothing equivalent for the AMD or Intel GPU drivers, but that might have changed meanwhile.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

My experience with an AMD iGPU on Linux was so bad that my next laptop will be Intel. Horrible instability to the point where I could reliably crash my machine by using Google Maps for a few minutes, on both Chrome and Firefox. It got fixed eventually - with the next Ubuntu release, so I had a computer where I was afraid to use anything with WebGL for half a year.

littlecranky67 2y ago

I got my nvidia 1060 back then during the crypto crysis when the price of AMD GPUs were inflated due to miners. Hesitant and scepital about Linux support, I upgraded the same machine with that GPU since 2016 von Ubuntu 14.04, to 18.04 and now 24.04 - without any nvidia driver issues anytime whatsoever. When I read about issues with nvidias drivers, it is mostly people with rare distro or rolling release ones, with changing kernel versions very frequently and failure to recompile with the binary drivers. For LTS distros you will likely have no issues.