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Comment by benchaney | Hacker News Reader

They mostly work most of the time. When people say they want something that "just works", they are looking for more consistency than that.

I don't doubt that they work for you, but not everyone is so lucky. I have encountered serious reliability issues with their drivers.

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The headache with Nvidia drivers and Linux is that depending on how new your model is and what distro you're using, you may or may not be able to load the GUI until you've manually upgraded kernel and disabled the Nouveau drivers (if enabled) then updated to latest nvidia-drivers-XXX package.

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.

Something interesting I've noticed is that there is a big difference in usability between desktops and laptops. Desktops I have far less issues. But laptops I have to get lucky to be able to use my HDMI port. And good luck doing that and having cuda support.

Out of curiosity, what laptop models + distros have you tried to set up?

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 an inspiron with a 1060Q and had similar problems on an HP envy (forgot the card in there). I've tried a bunch of distros (I've been on linux for about a decade and mainly run Arch though).

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.

Highly recommend Pop_OS!, it may as well be called "Ubuntu, except more driver patches and performance tweaks" haha.

And no Snap, although I suppose that could fall under performance tweaks.

> except more driver patches and performance tweaks

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).

This is right. I am running Pop OS, but will make the jump to Arch when I have time. I don't want to wait for the distro maintainers to release new kernels/language versions/etc. And once you start changing those things, the benefit of the distro starts to fade away.

A nice middle ground is Manjaro (there's a nice GUI to select your kernel). Though I'm not sure what nvidia settings Pop uses, because I still have the above issues with Manjaro. But this may again be laptop centric.

I've used Manjaro on two legacy laptops and a fairly recent desktop and I can only vote for it for almost anything you would want to do with your machine. It's a very lightweight and well-supported distro that has outperformed machines that are on paper twice the speed of the one it's installed on.

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.

I never really have Manjaro a look. My impression is/was that the focus of the distro was to be mac-like. Is that off base?

Usually, the best solution to putting Linux on a dual-GPU nvidia laptop is to stop doing it and go do something else.

Is that common to have dual-GPUs in a laptop?

Seems unnecessary to have dual-GPUs, and crazy to have both Nvidia and AMD in the one laptop.

One power hungry / hot one for gaming, one low-power / cool one for when not gaming.

From my experience with Optimus in the past: The system includes two GPUs, one that sucks for gaming and another one that also sucks for gaming :)

It's probably beter nowadays, but I will never consider it again.

But from two different manufacturers?

That's asking for trouble with driver issues.

Normally the low power gpu is the integrated Intel one that's on all their consumer chips, so it's more adding one gpu than slapping in competing ones. Although it does cause driver issues anyway, hence the thread.

Most laptops with any Nvidia hardware have two GPUs, one less power-hungry GPU integrated into the CPU and one dedicated GPU to play games on when you're connected to/sitting nearby a power outlet.

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.

That something else is to use an eGPU if you need to, or to buy a desktop.

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.

I've also ran into this. Disabling Nouveau is a must.

90% good * 90% of the time = 81% good all the time [only :( ]

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