- Ubuntu 18 I had hit or miss with the hdmi connection on my laptop (1060Q). 20% of the time it would work if I plugged it in. 50% of the time it would work if I had it plugged in and rebooted. This makes giving presentations difficult.
- Arch/Manjaro/Fedora/Ubuntu 16 I could never get the hdmi connection working for a laptop.
- All distros, difficulty getting cuda running AND using the display. Intel drivers for display + nvidia for cuda works, but this means I can't use my GPU when I want to do some of the limited linux gaming.
Laptops seem to have more problems than desktops. On desktops I have many more hits than misses (if I have the graphics card installed when I install the OS). Laptops have just been terrible.
Most of the people driving server gpu purchases are used to sucking it up and doing their work over ssh, instead of locally.
I don't doubt that they work for you, but not everyone is so lucky. I have encountered serious reliability issues with their drivers.
I tried to get Ubuntu/Pop_OS! 20.04 running on a dual-GPU laptop that has an RTX-2060 and AMD Renoir integrated. Had to modify kernel boot params to disable nouveau modeset and then run script for mainline kernel upgrade + drivers to get it to run. Was not a fun Saturday =/
But prior to this, yeah Nvidia non-open source drivers have mostly "just worked" for me on the older models.
On Acer Nitro 5 with Nvidia GTX-1060Ti and i5, stock Ubuntu 20.04 loaded no problems, and even DisplayLink driver for dual monitor, one through regular HDMI + other through USB -> HDMI adapter worked (though I couldn't get it to rotate display vertically).
The bugs I did have were with it constantly re-disovering network printers that I had to disable, and changing the default wifi power-saving settings because something was funky with it.
On Asus TUF A15 with Nvidia RTX-2060/AMD Renoir + AMD Ryzen 7 4800h absolutely no distro worked out-of-the-box and I needed mainline kernel + latest Nvidia drivers. But after fixing that myself Pop_OS picks up everything perfectly and no problems.
Both of them have CUDA working IIRC (at least running "nvidia-smi" says it does).
I have heard great things about Pop and I am going to be building a new machine with these new cards and giving pop a try.
Honestly, to me that's not a big sell lol. And probably not to the type of people that like distros like Arch. We just want nivida to work like AMD and mesa drivers do. (Having done some testing, I am able to squeeze more performance out of a distro that builds up, such as Arch, vs a distro that you take down, like Ubuntu).
Not sure how easy it is to actually game on it though, haven't tried yet. For everything else however, Manjaro is an extremely solid choice, with a very recent kernel too.
Seems unnecessary to have dual-GPUs, and crazy to have both Nvidia and AMD in the one laptop.
It's probably beter nowadays, but I will never consider it again.
That's asking for trouble with driver issues.
As good as the performance of mobile GPUs is these days, they still suck up a lot of power. I don't think you'll get much work done on the go with a laptop that only has a dedicated AMD/Nvidia GPU.
I mean, the constraints of a laptop and a desktop are as different as that of a car and a plane.
Laptops with dual-GPUs are as efficient as both as those car-plane convertibles.
This is real frustrating when I want to play older games that only support 4:3 and 5:4 resolutions, because I have to knock them all the way down to 1024x768.
There's a roundabout way to manually add custom resolutions, but I've never gotten it to work with X. Maybe it would play nicer with Wayland, if Nvidia made any real effort to actually support it.
IF you are using a server with a DE then it answers the question about how yes it does affect you because you are using a DE.
In either case, it isn't "just for gaming"
What's more surprising is that ATI doesn't take this opening.
https://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippl...
i'm using google chrome, vscode insiders and alacritty and vlc, and that's pretty much it, with very little problems, after i boot into wayland and launch chrome i get some stuttering on the shadows which goes away after a couple of seconds, but that's pretty much the only hassle
Nvidia works if you add their repo and install the blobs, maybe. If your distro is mainstream enough.
I don't have too many problems now, but just recently I ran into trouble with any application that used OpenGL not working, and it went away when I rebooted.
In general I'd say they've done an okay job, but still I've seen enough bugs to say they have room for improvement.
I don't know how many of those bugs are Nvidia's fault explicitly; Linux is a bit of a wild west when it comes to software configuration, and they can't test everything or fix every buggy application.
I've just switched to manjaro kde and I'm having a blast using it every day for work, any tips on the nvidia drivers is appreciated. I have managed to brick my distro a few times trying to get it set up (and by brick, I mean getting it into a state that I can't figure out how to recover it from).
When I install them myself by running the scripts that nvidia gives you, I've never had a problem with the drivers. I've always suspected that was the problem, the way the distro's package the drivers, rather than being a problem with the drivers themselves.