Is this a voting-with-your-wallet position for open drivers / better Linux support, or have you experienced issues in the past with the proprietary drivers?
I ask because Linux with an Nvidia gpu is my daily driver (desktop), and I’m likely to build another system like that again, was just curious what I don’t know.
I’ve never tried to run Linux on a machine with an NVIDIA GPU, or on a machine with two GPUs. But from what I have read, this is the impression that I get:
It’s quite common to have a bit of trouble getting anything working, and you will run into problems far more often than with any other brand of GPU (which will just work perfectly).
Many things won’t work with the proprietary drivers, because they implement everything their own way, and so software has to be written against the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, rather than using the standard tools that everything else uses like OpenGL and Mesa.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/linux-on-laptops-asu... is the sort of thing I’ve heard of: there, the NVIDIA GPU is trouble from start to end. Admittedly it might have gone more smoothly with something other than Ubuntu, with more recent versions of kernels and other such stuff (I like Arch, so this wouldn’t be a problem for me), but it’s still just bad.
But then too, I mentioned Wayland: because of how NVIDIA made their own world on Linux, the proprietary drivers are completely incompatible with Wayland—basically NVIDIA hardcoded support for X (again, rather than using the standard approach everyone else settled on) and haven’t done so for Wayland.
If you use Nouveau instead of the proprietary drivers, you’re left with a GPU missing a substantial fraction of its functionality, stuck at a low clock speed in power-draining mode. But I think you might be able to use Wayland.
I gather that Linux has problems in any dual GPU environment, but that the issues are far worse with NVIDIA than with anything else. If you’re operating a single-GPU machine and are content to use the proprietary drivers, I gather it’s not such a problem, though many applications may be unable to use GPU acceleration.
I welcome any corrections to what I’ve written here. As I say, this is all just hearsay.
I think if you start messing with one of distributions not on the CUDA download paper, you get stuck easily, but at least for work purposes, I don't see the point of using something other than RHEL/CentOS/Fedora/Debian.
But this is also just about the easiest setup. I might feel differently if I were on a laptop with dual graphics cards.
> It’s quite common to have a bit of trouble getting anything working, and you will run into problems far more often than with any other brand of GPU (which will just work perfectly).
That's a joke. I've been using Linux on Nvidia since the Riva TNT. It was always Radeon that had garbage drivers and really didn't give two shits about Linux. Not sure how much this has changed with AMD owning them, but I never bothered to look at Radeon since Nvidia was always the best card and always worked. It's almost never more than just doing a single package install.
> software has to be written against the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, rather than using the standard tools that everything else uses like OpenGL and Mesa.
I think you fundamentally do not understand Mesa or OpenGL to say this. And no, nothing has to be "written against" Nvidia. It's literally OpenGL (or Vulkan, today). Unless you're talking CUDA or something, which I don't touch.
This all just sounds like so much FUD that you wrote.
I’m referring to things like the Background section of https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/NVIDIA:
> The proprietary NVIDIA doesn't provide the same user space API as the open source drivers. While the open source drivers allows the display server to use the Generic Buffer Manager (gbm) and Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) APIs to manage hardware buffers, set modes, and queue page flips, configure hardware planes, the NVIDIA driver forces the display server to treat it differently. Instead of these APIs, the compositor uses a combination of KMS, to set modes, and EGL (EGLDevice & EGLStream extensions to be precise) to indirectly queue page flips by linking an EGLSurface, corresponding to an area of the screen, with a CRTC of an EGLDevice, using an EGLStream.
My OpenGL and Mesa remarks are very probably wrong.
The impression that I have received is that the window manager is probably the main thing that needs to be aware of these differences and NVIDIA ignoring the standards (this is why Sway doesn’t support NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html), but that anything wanting to actually use GPU capabilities may well need to be aware as well.
—
What I have heard on the GPU drivers situation is that Radeon used to be terrible (and NVIDIA less terrible despite doing things its own way rather than the standard way), but that they overhauled it all completely so that for at least the last five years it’s been great.
Long story short, it works. On Desktop, that is.
So I an not sure how representative your opinion is.
On the other hand, I had gpu problems on Linus with literally every single laptop I have ever owned, independent of Gpu brand. So there’s that.
Nvidia proprietary drivers existed and worked, the AMD stuff was worse.
It makes more sense if it's about open vs. proprietary rather than what works better.
Though sounds like things may have changed since then.
I upgraded recently from an intel/nvidia setup (GTX 1070) to a zen3 w/ a Radeon 6800. Honestly, both nvidia and AMD have excellent support on Linux. Both hardware decode, play steam games, are stable, support the latest kernel etc..
However, latest steam games (and proton in particular) is better tested against Mesa (AMD OSS drivers), so it's the place to be for gaming on linux. AMD also tears less on Linux, and supports Wayland (though Wayland support could be the reason for less tearing).
Either way, I'm fully AMD now and wouldn't go back. I see zero downsides, and a few upsides.
However, I had to choose NVIDIA only because of CUDA.