Hacker News Reader

Comment by blondin | Hacker News Reader

this looks amazing! i wonder why the beta is windows only though...

I'm using an Nvidia RTX 3090 on Linux with the proprietary drivers for machine learning and man it fucking sucks as a desktop lately.

So my best guess is nobody at Nvidia uses the Linux desktop as a workstation.

1) My HDMI screen hasn't been able to wake from sleep for over a year now, the only way to make it wake is to switch to a text tty and then back to X11.

2) Wayland still isn't supported. The default Ubuntu 18.04 gdm doesn't even work so on first boot with the proprietary driver everything seems broken.

3) Since Firefox 89 switched to accelerated rendering by default, windows randomly disappear and various video players have lock contention, drop frames at 60fps, and downscale video on a fucking $1600 video card.

4) HDMI audio crackles and pops with a 2 second delay after a few hours and I have to restart pulseaudio on the command line.

5) I file support tickets on Nvidia's website and the company never responds, they don't even dupe them with some other old ticket.

> The default Ubuntu 18.04 gdm doesn't even work

I mean, using ubuntu 18.04 means using ~4/5 years old software which only gets "security updates" (not even patch updates, e.g. they use a Qt LTS from 2017 and don't even update the patch version, it's still 5.9.5 while Qt's is 5.9.9), why would you expect things to work correctly with a 1 year old graphics card. On archlinux wayland with an nvidia card works pretty much fine.

This has been broken since 2019. I’m running Ubuntu 20.04 with the 5.11 kernel and the 460/465 drivers and all these problems are still happening.

And also, yes, I expect a 5 year old operating system to still work. Windows 10 does and it came out in 2015. These are professional tools for my fucking job.

> And also, yes, I expect a 5 year old operating system to still work. Windows 10 does and it came out in 2015.

but the windows 10 you run in 2021 is super different from the windows 10 you installed in 2015, there are ton of (sometimes fairly breaking) updates :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_version_history

running an up-to-date win10 is basically equivalent to updating to every ubuntu release, LTS or not. Kernel is different, libc is different, system APIs implementations are different, everything is updated every few months - even the start menu pretty much changes all the time.

Do they not port the HWE to older LTS releases?

“But everything just works” says the Linux enthusiast after fiddling with their xorg config in the morning.

That is true but I would like that point out that windows still has issues on my bog standard Intel/Nvidia rig - e.g. Linux can't sleep properly, but windows either fails to resume properly or randomly wakes me up at night by revving turning back on and revving the fans.

Similarly, my new iPad pro is great until you need to do something apple haven't approved of (e.g. I can't watch a bunch of movies I have had copies of for years due to apple not letting VLC ship certain codecs)

I ended up selling my Nvidia card for an AMD one. I was having so many problems with Linux like you're describing, and now they're all gone :)

Yeah I can't remember ever having any problems with Intel graphics on all the laptops I've owned.

It's night and day how much Intel cares about Linux compared to Nvidia.

Indeed it's night and day how Intel performs compared to Nvidia as well.

Yeah you’re right, even low power Intel gpus can render an X11 desktop with audio wayyyyy faster and with less artifacts than the proprietary nvidia driver.

I'll never forget Intel for lying about OpenGL support in some old laptop drivers for Windows.

The software focused teams all use Linux workstations afaik, look at their job boards and blind. Their embedded systems (robotics / av) are all Linux as well.

I simply do not believe that given how bad their drivers are.

I would not be surprised if most or all of their Linux engineers ssh into Linux from a Windows machine given how stable their command line stuff is in comparison to the graphics (once you figure out the correct permutation of userland/kernel pieces to get CUDA+cudnn+TF working anyways).

Their recommended method of installing cuda includes a 64-bit version, but not a 32-bit version. Nvidia's cuda packages are marked as incompatible with debian's nvidia-driver-* packages, so installing it uninstalls the 32-bit version. As a result, I need to choose between steam (which uses the 32-bit graphics library) and an updated cuda version (since Ubuntu 20.04's repo is pinned at 10.2).

Install the cuda-toolkit- package instead of the cuda- package in that usecase.

I recently switched to the 465 driver (on Ubuntu 20.04) and had issues: try downgrading back to 460 if you're in the same boat.

That happened to me yesterday on my work laptop. System 76's help documentation said to chroot in from rescue media, uninstall the drivers, then reinstall, and that worked fine, so it's now running 465 perfectly well. No idea why the straight upgrade path doesn't work.

But that's completely an Ubuntu problem, not NVIDIA. Like a (currently) higher up comment says, NVIDIA on Linux works fine as long as you're running the latest version of everything. My main desktop was built last April and I've been running Arch with RTX 2070 and the latest NVIDIA drivers ever since first boot and it has never given me any trouble, video or audio. My display is a 50 inch OLED connected via HDMI and audio a 5-channel soundbar with external subwoofer using eARC from the display. Everything is fine using GNOME defaults.

NVIDIA provides the nvidia-xconfig tool to autogenerate the X configuration, but you don't need it. It runs fine with no config. Wayland has worked for over a year, too. You can go look at the PKGBUILD file for Arch's PulseAudio installer and it isn't doing anything special, either, just applying the suggest default from PulseAudio's documentation making the ALSA default module pulse.

The only reason NVIDIA on Linux gives people so many problems is they're trying to run old versions of everything on enterprise-oriented Linux distros or "long-term support" without purchasing support. If you want the latest hardware, use the latest software.

(1) works fine for me over DP, didn’t try HDMI. (4) sounds (heh) like a pulseaudio problem.

Why wouldn't it be?

The entire deep learning / AI industry relies on running GPU compute on Linux, mostly CUDA on Nvidia GPUs.

Because most real-world CUDA research happens on Linux with Python and Jupyter?

Most end-users are on Windows, however.

That may not be the case for much longer. The press release on their final financial report from last year:

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...

Data center revenue at $6.7 billion. Gaming at $7.7 billion. But data center grew 124%, gaming 41%. If that keeps up, data center passes gaming this year.

I don't think data centers count as end users. End users are human beings that use a system.

That doesn't make any sense to me. Human ML/AI researchers are also users and NVIDIA clearly intentionally targets them as a market segment. They don't only care about pleasing gamers running Windows.

in the context of a desktop app, it seems pretty clear 'alphachloride was referring to desktop users.

how is the existence of big datacenters relevant to what platforms nvidia will support for a desktop app?

and most artists who utilize CUDA use Windows.

Perhaps other operating systems aren't advanced or powerful enough? Mac doesn't support NVIDIA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com