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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

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.
      - chasil 2y ago
        Your problem there is that both search engines place this image and backstory at the top of the results, so neither Google nor Bing agree with any of you. If you think they're wrong, be sure to let them know.
        lyu07282 2y ago
        What torvalds is complaining about is absolutely true, but the problem is that most users do not give a shit about those issues. Torvalds disagreement wasn't about bugs in-, or complains about the quality of the proprietary driver, he complained about nvidias lack of open source contributions and bad behavior towards the kernel developer community. But users don't care if they run a proprietary driver as long as it works (and it does work fine for most people). So you see now why that's not very relevant to end-users experiences they were talking about?
        chasil 2y ago
        No.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        Do you think Google and Bing are endorsing top results, and in particular endorsing a result like that in the specific context of what manufacturers I consider buying from? That's the only way they would be disagreeing with me.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - dahart 2y ago
      Torvalds has said nasty mean things to a lot of people in the past, and expressed regret over his temper & hyperbole. Try searching for something more recent https://youtu.be/wvQ0N56pW74 https://youtu.be/wvQ0N56pW74
  - lyu07282 2y ago
    a lot has probably to do with not really understanding their distributions package manager and lkms specifically, I also always suspected that most Linux users don't know if they are using Wayland or X11 and the issues they had were actually Wayland specific ones they wouldn't have with Nvidia/x11 and come to think of it, how would they even know if it's a GPU driver issue in the first place? Guess I'm the mechanic in your analogy.
    - sqeaky 2y ago
      When I run Gentoo or Arch, I know. But when I run Ubuntu or Fedora, should I have needed to know? On plenty of distros "I want to install it and forget about is reasonable" and on both Gentoo and Ubuntu I have rebooted from a working system into a system where the display stopped working, at least on Gentoo I was ready because I broke it somehow.
      - lyu07282 2y ago
        Absolutely I once had an issue with kernel/user-space driver version mismatch in Ubuntu, trivial to fix and the kernel logs tell you what's wrong. But yeah I get that most users don't read their kernel logs and it shouldn't be an expectation to do so for normal users of linux. The experiences are just very different, it's why the car mechanic analogy fits so well. I think it also got so much better over time, I've been using Linux since debian woody (22 years ago) the stuff you had to deal with back then heavily skews my perspective on what users today see as unacceptable brokenness in the Nvidia driver.
      - anon291 2y ago
        I've run NixOS for almost a decade now and I honestly would not recommend anything else. I've had many issues with booting on almost every distro. They're about as reliable as Windows in that regard. NixOS has been absolutely rock solid; beyond anything I could possibly have hoped for. In the extremely rare case my system would not boot, I've either found a hardware problem that would affect anyone, or I could just revert to a previous system revision and boot up. Never had any problem. No longer use anything else because it's just too risky
    - 2y ago
- lmm 2y ago
  > 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. That's the opposite of my experience. I'd love to support open-source. But the AMD experience is just too flaky, too card-dependent. NVidia is rock-solid (maybe not for Wayland, but I never wanted Wayland in the first place).
  - sqeaky 2y ago
    What kind of flakiness? The only AMD GPU problem I have had involved a lightning strike killing a card while I was gaming. My nvidia problems are generally software and update related. The NVidia stuff usually works on popular distros, but as soon anything custom or a surprise update happens then there is a chance things break.
    - lmm 2y ago
      > What kind of flakiness? Black screens, X server crashes, OpenGL programs either crashing or running slow. Just general unreliability. Different driver versions seemed more reliable than others, which meant I was always very reluctant to upgrade, which then gives you more problems as you end up pinning old versions which then makes it harder to troubleshoot online... > My nvidia problems are generally software and update related. The NVidia stuff usually works on popular distros, but as soon anything custom or a surprise update happens then there is a chance things break. I mean if you run mixed versions then yeah that will work for some upgrades and not others. A decent package manager should prevent that; some distros refuse to put effort into packaging the nvidia-drivers out of principle. But if you keep the drivers in sync (which is what the official package from NVidia themselves does, it's not their fault some distros choose to explode it into multiple packages) and properly rebuild just the kernel module every time you do a kernel upgrade (or just reinstall the whole driver if you prefer), then it's rock solid.
bobajeff 2y ago
I did when my card stopped being supported by all the distros because it was too old while the legacy driver didn't fully work the same.
l33tman 2y ago
Same here, been using the nvidia binary drivers on a dozen computers with various other HW and distros for decades with never any problems whatsoever.
pizza234 2y ago
Up to a couple of years ago, before permanently moving to AMD GPUs, I couldn't even boot Ubuntu with an Nvida GPU. This was because Ubuntu booted by default with Nouveau, which didn't support a few/several series (I had at least two different series). The cards worked fine with binary drivers once the system was installed, but AFAIR, I had to integrate the binary driver packages in the Ubuntu ISO in order to boot. I presume that now, the situation is much better, but necessiting binary drivers can be a problem in itself.
resoluteteeth 2y ago
Are you using wayland or are you still on x11? My experience was that the closed source drivers were fine with x11 but a nightmare with wayland.
Keyframe 2y ago
Me too. Now I have a laptop with discrete nvidia and an eGPU with 3090 in it, a desktop with 4090, another laptop with another discrete nvidia.. all switching combinations work, acceleration works, game performance is on par with windows (even with proton to within a small percentage or even sometimes better). All out of the box with stock Ubuntu and installing driver from Nvidia site. The only "trick" is I'm still on X11 and probably will stay. Note that I did try wayland on few occasions but I steered away (mostly due to other issues with it at the time).
isatty 2y ago
Likewise. Rock solid for decades in intel + nvidia proprietary drivers even when doing things like hot plugging for passthroughs.
- anon291 2y ago
  Yeah I once worked at a cloud gaming company that used Wine on Linux on NVIDIA to stream cloud games. They were the only real option for multi-game performance, and very rock solid in terms of uptime. I truly have no idea what people are talking about. Yes I use X11.

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.
    - chasil 2y ago
      Your problem there is that both search engines place this image and backstory at the top of the results, so neither Google nor Bing agree with any of you. If you think they're wrong, be sure to let them know.
      - lyu07282 2y ago
        What torvalds is complaining about is absolutely true, but the problem is that most users do not give a shit about those issues. Torvalds disagreement wasn't about bugs in-, or complains about the quality of the proprietary driver, he complained about nvidias lack of open source contributions and bad behavior towards the kernel developer community. But users don't care if they run a proprietary driver as long as it works (and it does work fine for most people). So you see now why that's not very relevant to end-users experiences they were talking about?
        chasil 2y ago
        No.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        Do you think Google and Bing are endorsing top results, and in particular endorsing a result like that in the specific context of what manufacturers I consider buying from? That's the only way they would be disagreeing with me.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dahart 2y ago
    Torvalds has said nasty mean things to a lot of people in the past, and expressed regret over his temper & hyperbole. Try searching for something more recent https://youtu.be/wvQ0N56pW74 https://youtu.be/wvQ0N56pW74
- lyu07282 2y ago
  a lot has probably to do with not really understanding their distributions package manager and lkms specifically, I also always suspected that most Linux users don't know if they are using Wayland or X11 and the issues they had were actually Wayland specific ones they wouldn't have with Nvidia/x11 and come to think of it, how would they even know if it's a GPU driver issue in the first place? Guess I'm the mechanic in your analogy.
  - sqeaky 2y ago
    When I run Gentoo or Arch, I know. But when I run Ubuntu or Fedora, should I have needed to know? On plenty of distros "I want to install it and forget about is reasonable" and on both Gentoo and Ubuntu I have rebooted from a working system into a system where the display stopped working, at least on Gentoo I was ready because I broke it somehow.
    - lyu07282 2y ago
      Absolutely I once had an issue with kernel/user-space driver version mismatch in Ubuntu, trivial to fix and the kernel logs tell you what's wrong. But yeah I get that most users don't read their kernel logs and it shouldn't be an expectation to do so for normal users of linux. The experiences are just very different, it's why the car mechanic analogy fits so well. I think it also got so much better over time, I've been using Linux since debian woody (22 years ago) the stuff you had to deal with back then heavily skews my perspective on what users today see as unacceptable brokenness in the Nvidia driver.
    - anon291 2y ago
      I've run NixOS for almost a decade now and I honestly would not recommend anything else. I've had many issues with booting on almost every distro. They're about as reliable as Windows in that regard. NixOS has been absolutely rock solid; beyond anything I could possibly have hoped for. In the extremely rare case my system would not boot, I've either found a hardware problem that would affect anyone, or I could just revert to a previous system revision and boot up. Never had any problem. No longer use anything else because it's just too risky
  - 2y ago
lmm 2y ago
> 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. That's the opposite of my experience. I'd love to support open-source. But the AMD experience is just too flaky, too card-dependent. NVidia is rock-solid (maybe not for Wayland, but I never wanted Wayland in the first place).
- sqeaky 2y ago
  What kind of flakiness? The only AMD GPU problem I have had involved a lightning strike killing a card while I was gaming. My nvidia problems are generally software and update related. The NVidia stuff usually works on popular distros, but as soon anything custom or a surprise update happens then there is a chance things break.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > What kind of flakiness? Black screens, X server crashes, OpenGL programs either crashing or running slow. Just general unreliability. Different driver versions seemed more reliable than others, which meant I was always very reluctant to upgrade, which then gives you more problems as you end up pinning old versions which then makes it harder to troubleshoot online... > My nvidia problems are generally software and update related. The NVidia stuff usually works on popular distros, but as soon anything custom or a surprise update happens then there is a chance things break. I mean if you run mixed versions then yeah that will work for some upgrades and not others. A decent package manager should prevent that; some distros refuse to put effort into packaging the nvidia-drivers out of principle. But if you keep the drivers in sync (which is what the official package from NVidia themselves does, it's not their fault some distros choose to explode it into multiple packages) and properly rebuild just the kernel module every time you do a kernel upgrade (or just reinstall the whole driver if you prefer), then it's rock solid.

bobajeff 2y ago

I did when my card stopped being supported by all the distros because it was too old while the legacy driver didn't fully work the same.

l33tman 2y ago

Same here, been using the nvidia binary drivers on a dozen computers with various other HW and distros for decades with never any problems whatsoever.

pizza234 2y ago

Up to a couple of years ago, before permanently moving to AMD GPUs, I couldn't even boot Ubuntu with an Nvida GPU. This was because Ubuntu booted by default with Nouveau, which didn't support a few/several series (I had at least two different series). The cards worked fine with binary drivers once the system was installed, but AFAIR, I had to integrate the binary driver packages in the Ubuntu ISO in order to boot. I presume that now, the situation is much better, but necessiting binary drivers can be a problem in itself.

resoluteteeth 2y ago

Are you using wayland or are you still on x11? My experience was that the closed source drivers were fine with x11 but a nightmare with wayland.

Keyframe 2y ago

Me too. Now I have a laptop with discrete nvidia and an eGPU with 3090 in it, a desktop with 4090, another laptop with another discrete nvidia.. all switching combinations work, acceleration works, game performance is on par with windows (even with proton to within a small percentage or even sometimes better). All out of the box with stock Ubuntu and installing driver from Nvidia site. The only "trick" is I'm still on X11 and probably will stay. Note that I did try wayland on few occasions but I steered away (mostly due to other issues with it at the time).

isatty 2y ago

Likewise. Rock solid for decades in intel + nvidia proprietary drivers even when doing things like hot plugging for passthroughs.

anon291 2y ago
Yeah I once worked at a cloud gaming company that used Wine on Linux on NVIDIA to stream cloud games. They were the only real option for multi-game performance, and very rock solid in terms of uptime. I truly have no idea what people are talking about. Yes I use X11.