This is great news. Honestly I've never had a problem with Ubuntu on machines that are just a 1-year or older. There are so many i7 laptops in the secondary market that work perfectly.
I know how to fix it because this has happened with pretty much all graphic cards I've had, I'll have to go into and mess with the grub config, make it run in safe mode, restart, try another grub config, restart, find out it doesn't work, run safe mode and reinstall the old drivers, cross my finger and wonder where my Saturday went.
Gentoo was the most reliant by a long shot (maybe for the simple reason it always asked if it should replace my config), but that is a time sink in whole other league.
Have heard good things about Fedora lately, but I dread throwing away the Debian knowledge I amassed.
Currently running Fedora on an XPS13 Dev edition laptop.
Wayland, Gnome and Firefox are working together very nicely.
Mixed HiDPI with standard seems to be solved now. I’ve seen the odd glitch where an app gets confused as you move from one screen to another but overall very good.
Trackpad latency is improving but still not quite perfect. The fact that it’s close and constantly improving though makes me very positive about using Linux in place of my MBP full time.
I actually miss the Gnome window management shortcuts when I move back to my Mac.
All Wayland compositors come with some tool, that can take screenshots.
But then, is it a real problem? I understand, that some users might be inconvenienced by that, because they got used to it in their workflow... but is it really a showstopper?
> my RTX 2070
I still do not understand, why you folks with Nvidia hardware expect it to work out of the box in Linux, when there have been two decades of experience that Nvidia doesn't care about that and won't allow anyone to do anything with that.
So no, your RTX won't work as nice OOTB as Intel and AMD GPUs do. It will continue to be the case while you continue to give them money for them ignoring you.
Otherwise, you will be frustrated on desktop and it still won't work out of the box.
Possibly one of the saddest solutions ever proposed. Besides then one can’t game on it
What is sad, is to reward Nvidia with your money despite being full aware, that they don't want you to have a nice Linux experience as the other vendors do.
Muh games fps is just a nail in the coffin.
If I were to specify a system most likely to "just work" with Nvidia, I'd probably go for whatever version of CentOS FB, Google and Amazon use internally.
The Nvidia drivers provided by Nvidia work great. In Blender I got full CUDA support and even RTX raytracing support (RTX 2070 Super).
And as far as I know developing with the CUDA toolkit just works fine.
Literally the parent post, emphasis mine:
> Graphics drivers and WiFi drivers never worked without significant pampering for me in Ubuntu, and I've been using Linux for 15 years. Just last week I updated my working Nvidia drivers for my RTX 2070 card via Ubuntus GUI and lo and behold after restart the screen is just black.
So which is it?
It does work out of the box for most people. Of course there are people with problems. But overall you can expect Nvidia to work out of the box. There are loads of people gaming (Steam) and CUDA programming on Linux boxes. So I don't understand why I should not expect Nvidia to work on Linux. To me it just sounds like a false statement.
I can tell you, it was not something that worked OOTB. Distributions that shipped Nouveau at least did boot into GUI, but since I have 4k display, it was extremely slow. Unusable slow. It is not due to Nouveau not trying; they couldn't ship the signed firmware files they needed for reclocking.
So after switching to lower-resolution mode, I was able to install the system. Then I could install the proprietary driver. Aside the fact that it ignores Linux APIs/doesn't play nice with Wayland (what would you say about driver for Windows, that ignores WDDM and instead ships it's own display server?), it worked quite nice... until the first kernel update. So yeah, DKMS took the care about rebuild, it just took extra time at the first boot with the new kernel, and I could only hope that the new kernel doesn't break whatever building the shim expects, leaving me with a text console and taking next hour or two for me fixing it. Or that something else breaks, like that nvidia update, that killed X server in the process, which took down the terminal with yum that was running that update, resulting in me spending about two hours fixing the resulting mess. Another downsides were that I had to install compiler tools (which I usually do not have installed, or at least not outside of containers) and telling bye-bye to Secure Boot. So yes, it works, if you tinker. Not the kind of tinkering because you are in the mood, but the kind of tinkering that you have to, because something broke again.
Contrast that with AMD or Intel cards: they work out of the box with any modern distribution. You don't have to install anything; everything needed is already part of the distro. You can also update your system without fear, that something breaks, the updates come with your system updates, modules are signed by your distro and load in Secure Boot mode. Wrt. drivers, it is a Mac-like experience, you can forget that anything called drivers exists, stuff just works. It is something I can give to my parents, leave updates enabled and still be assured, that it won't break exactly at the time I cannot visit them and fix stuff for them.
And it is something that the Linux community can't do anything about. Nvidia keeps their cards close to the chest and won't allow the community to improve the situation. There's a reason why Linus has shown Nvidia the finger.
So in the closing: unless we two have vastly different ideas about what works out of the box means, no, Nvidia doesn't work out of the box. All the people gaming and running CUDA with Nvidia have to tinker.
* Buy Lenovo
* Have integrated graphics (i.e. Intel)
* Run Fedora
This combination has, for a few years now, given me excellent reliability 'out of the box'. I don't have to do anything and everything from the fingerprint scanner to the wifi Just Works. There's still a bit of a battery life penalty compared to Windows, but it's not enormous.
I ended up getting an ASUS f510ua (cheap variant with a 1TB 5200rpm hdd) and adding a 256GB m.2 ssd for my boot drive. 8GB ram and an i5 8250U. Found a deal on the laptop so the total cost ended up ~$600 USD, although I think m.2 ssds are cheaper now. I've been pretty happy with the performance; it's just enough to comfortably do Android dev (I use vim though, not Android Studio).
The aspect I had to compromise on was build quality. The body is plastic and especially the screen has little reinforcement to bending specifically. It's not completely flimsy but I don't like carrying it around open in crowded/public spaces where it's more likely I'll bump into something and I wouldn't bet on it surviving a fall unscathed (my previous laptop, a Dell XPS 14, did exactly that, from college dorm bed to uncarpeted floor). It has also grown a single dead pixel, that I don't notice in regular use.
I expected the build quality going in, and overall I'm pretty happy with the purchase. I used it for 8+ hours daily for 9 months when I was separated from my desktop.
When I try most laptops in shops they feel terrible to be honest.
My first laptop was an Asus. To be fair it was as well speced as laptops 2 years later but the screen bowed in the middle.
How's the keyboard on those Asus laptops?
It even supports devices no longer working on Macs and windows without any user interaction.
Of course, high-end nvidia boards seem to have all kind of problem. Stay away from Nvidia if you are a Linux user.
But it was a kind of miracle it worked out of the box. Because before that I had to manually fix the Wi-Fi driver.
Hardware changes sometimes turn into a hell on Linux (Ubuntu). But I still won't go to Windows or MacOS. I just like the freedom of Linux. And when things are working, most of the time they keep working. On an other pc I have over 6 years of Ubuntu upgrades and it is still running fine.
I also had this issues because I wanted to try newer drivers, it is expected if the new driver does not work I go in terminal and install the previous working version. I personally prefer how easy is to test different driver version in Linux while in Windows I needed to make an account to upgrade my NVIDIA drivers(maybe you can avoid creating an account I am not 100% sure but at that time I was dual booting to play some game and I did not had a weekend to spend o how to upgrade my drivers without an account ... in the end I could not solve the issue where Oblivion had a black screen and I played it with Wine in Linux)
I think I can see Arch showing off a bit of ankle at you. Think of Arch as a bit like Gentoo without the burning lap.
My personal systems are not exciting. I login with Active Directory creds and I have an Exchange account for email. I just happen to have multiple CAD apps available and lots of other stuff out of the box. When I update my PCs/laptops the whole lot update and off I trot. I get the occasional bit of breakage but because Arch is rolling it is only a small problem at a time and not a massive total meltdown.
I'm 50 next year - I studied Civ Eng at college. I am a fat ass PHB and sysadmin all in one package. I should also point out that my company is running reasonably happily despite SARS-CoV-2, so I think me and my two partners have done a reasonable job of the PHB thing. We still have all of our 20 employees and expect to come out with a (low n) £n00,000 loss on the books due to a virus. Happily we had >£n00,000 in the bank before hand to deal with unforeseen cash flow snags because we are boring and like to sleep at night.
To summarise: Don't diss Arch (or Gentoo) as a silly ricer distro. If you approach a problem with a true engineer's attitude and an open mind then unlikely solutions can arise. Also, keep some cash under the mattress for a rainy day.
It's a pita, _hopefully_ one day AMD and ROCm will be a viable alternative.