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Intel has earned a lot of credit in the Linux space. Nvidia is trash tier in terms of support and only recently making serious steps to actually support the pl

Intel has earned a lot of credit in the Linux space. Nvidia is trash tier in terms of support and only recently making serious steps to actually support the platform. AMD went all in nearly a decade ago and it's working pretty well for them. They are mostly caught up to being Intel grade support in the kernel. Meanwhile, Intel has been doing this since I was in college. I was running the i915 driver in Ubuntu 20 years ago. Sure their chips are super low power stuff, but what you can do with them and the level of software support you get is unmatched. Years before these other vendors were taking the platform seriously Intel was supporting and funding Mesa development.

tristan957 2y ago
The AMD driver has been great on my Framework 13, but the 6.10 series was completely busted. 6.11 worked fine. I can't remember a series where any of my Intel laptops didn't work for that long.
ryao 2y ago
This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years. AMD on the other hand gives lousy support. File a bug report about a problem and expect to be ignored, especially if it has anything to do with emulation. Intel’s Linux support on the other hand has been very good for me too.
- MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
  Nvidia desktop GPUs may be fine on Linux now, but are very much still trash on Laptops. I can't even begin to express how troublesome they have been on the work laptops I've been forced to use. I would've killed for any non-Nvidia laptop, even if just integrated graphics, but IT won't approve any other models, and the UEFI lacks an option to fully disable the Nvidia GPU.
  - ryao 2y ago
    On Optimus laptops, I usually disable the Intel GPU rather than deal with GPU switching. Those poor souls that have laptops without a proper multiplexer cannot do that, but I doubt it is a huge problem. With vulkan, you can specify the GPU to use via an environment variable.
    - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
      The Optimus-encumbered ThinkPad P16s Gen1 I'm currently stuck with has no exposed option to disable the Nvidia GPU in the UEFI. The environment variable trick, as far as I know, can't be used to prevent the entire desktop from touching the dGPU. Almost all of my issues are related to the desktop compositor crashing or freezing after too many DKMS power events, returning from sleep, [un]docking from my external display, or just plain running for too many hours. I'm on the latest firmware, kernel, and drivers, and it still gives me grief.
      - ryao 2y ago
        Black list the kernel driver for the Nvidia card if you want to disable it. That said, I wonder if you are using the nouveau driver. The Nvidia driver should not have such issues.
- ddtaylor 2y ago
  > This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years. They have been improving because getting CUDA running on the platform in datacenters required some level of cooperation. They eventually realized this had to happen regardless for AI in the datacenter and so eventually they got a kernel module starting to be added. It's not really there yet and it doesn't run the actual driver, but it gets a pathway to booting Nvidia with signed drivers among other things. The end result is our support forums are still full of Nvidia users. Go to any support forum or Reddit related to Linux and view the comments and press CTRL+F for Nvidia. It's so common we have to just tag/bin these posts and move on because there are literally man years of time being wasted on this. > AMD on the other hand gives lousy support. I can open a bug right now on both GitHub and the LKMS directly with AMD engineers. When I have a question about ROCm I can ask them and get a quick response. These guys are in Reddit threads talking to ROCm users and giving them guidance on how to modify their consumer grade Radeon cards to use the datacenter grade drivers that aren't adapted to consumer facing cards yet. The one thing we for sure agree on is that Intel doesn't have any of this BS. Their stuff just works and their pipeline for getting anything fixed is also well optimized.
  - ryao 2y ago
    I have been using the Nvidia driver for many years, had minimal problems and had great responses from Nvidia when I did report issues. As for opening a bug on GitHub, there is a difference between them responding and them fixing things. I have seen many people report bugs without them fixing the issues. There is one prominent issue for parity between direct3d q2 and vulkan that was needed by emulators that they outright refused to fix: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/issues/108 https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/issues/108 With Intel, the last time I opened a bug with them, they fixed the issue I reported within 24 hours.

tristan957 2y ago

The AMD driver has been great on my Framework 13, but the 6.10 series was completely busted. 6.11 worked fine. I can't remember a series where any of my Intel laptops didn't work for that long.

ryao 2y ago

This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years. AMD on the other hand gives lousy support. File a bug report about a problem and expect to be ignored, especially if it has anything to do with emulation. Intel’s Linux support on the other hand has been very good for me too.

MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
Nvidia desktop GPUs may be fine on Linux now, but are very much still trash on Laptops. I can't even begin to express how troublesome they have been on the work laptops I've been forced to use. I would've killed for any non-Nvidia laptop, even if just integrated graphics, but IT won't approve any other models, and the UEFI lacks an option to fully disable the Nvidia GPU.
- ryao 2y ago
  On Optimus laptops, I usually disable the Intel GPU rather than deal with GPU switching. Those poor souls that have laptops without a proper multiplexer cannot do that, but I doubt it is a huge problem. With vulkan, you can specify the GPU to use via an environment variable.
  - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
    The Optimus-encumbered ThinkPad P16s Gen1 I'm currently stuck with has no exposed option to disable the Nvidia GPU in the UEFI. The environment variable trick, as far as I know, can't be used to prevent the entire desktop from touching the dGPU. Almost all of my issues are related to the desktop compositor crashing or freezing after too many DKMS power events, returning from sleep, [un]docking from my external display, or just plain running for too many hours. I'm on the latest firmware, kernel, and drivers, and it still gives me grief.
    - ryao 2y ago
      Black list the kernel driver for the Nvidia card if you want to disable it. That said, I wonder if you are using the nouveau driver. The Nvidia driver should not have such issues.
ddtaylor 2y ago
> This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years. They have been improving because getting CUDA running on the platform in datacenters required some level of cooperation. They eventually realized this had to happen regardless for AI in the datacenter and so eventually they got a kernel module starting to be added. It's not really there yet and it doesn't run the actual driver, but it gets a pathway to booting Nvidia with signed drivers among other things. The end result is our support forums are still full of Nvidia users. Go to any support forum or Reddit related to Linux and view the comments and press CTRL+F for Nvidia. It's so common we have to just tag/bin these posts and move on because there are literally man years of time being wasted on this. > AMD on the other hand gives lousy support. I can open a bug right now on both GitHub and the LKMS directly with AMD engineers. When I have a question about ROCm I can ask them and get a quick response. These guys are in Reddit threads talking to ROCm users and giving them guidance on how to modify their consumer grade Radeon cards to use the datacenter grade drivers that aren't adapted to consumer facing cards yet. The one thing we for sure agree on is that Intel doesn't have any of this BS. Their stuff just works and their pipeline for getting anything fixed is also well optimized.
- ryao 2y ago
  I have been using the Nvidia driver for many years, had minimal problems and had great responses from Nvidia when I did report issues. As for opening a bug on GitHub, there is a difference between them responding and them fixing things. I have seen many people report bugs without them fixing the issues. There is one prominent issue for parity between direct3d q2 and vulkan that was needed by emulators that they outright refused to fix: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/issues/108 https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/issues/108 With Intel, the last time I opened a bug with them, they fixed the issue I reported within 24 hours.