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Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

I still cannot run a Wayland session on my machine w/ an nvidia 3080 with the latest drivers. It either fails to boot (KDE) or runs at about 15 FPS (Gnome).

It seems a little unreasonable to be this mad at a company for not supporting an environment that doesn't work for the vast majority of hardware out there. Especially given that you can just use Zoom within Firefox.

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I dunno. This isn't a person who's throwing a tantrum because something just didn't work perfectly. This is a pretty even-handed description of a problem whose solution was delivered to Zoom on a plate multiple times, which they repeatedly ignored before declaring that they personally discovered the cause and then blamed Gnome. I would have understood if this person got upset and wrote expletive-laden write-up because it's quite an irritating sequence of events, but that's not what this is.

I read it in a much different tone, but maybe that was me reading too much into it.

I've been using Zoom on Gnome almost daily in the last three years. I've basically no problem with video conference itself. Video just works for me. But audio is a never ending story. Zoom randomly selects other audio devices, when I quit one video session and start another. Sometimes, I have to to quit zoom and start it again. Sometimes I have to disconnect my table speaker/microphone to be able to use it in zoom again. It still works with every other software I've tried. When I start zoom, I get the dialog to share crash information 95% of the times I start zoom. Zoom is not able to store my account password or even the username under linux. So, when I open my macbook, it's zoom client wakes up, disconnects my zoom client on linux and I have to go fetch my zoom password from 1password once more. The zoom client under linux fails to safe room passwords all the time. The Zoom client makes it extra hard to call it with command line args to open a special room including password immediately. I could go on. It is just a huge pain in the ... . But most "entreprise grade" competitors are far worse.

Even though my experience with Zoom under Linux is much smoother, I can confirm the "random audio device" issue; it may be daunting. And the inability to accept command-line arguments is a choice, not a technical problem.

Another fun bit: the same version of Zoom on the same hardware (T470, i5) offers virtual background support under Windows, and disables it under Linux. The machine has no dedicated GPU to have driver issues with.

Virtual Background works perfectly for me on Linux. On a laptop with nvidia hardware.

(On Fedora 34, xorg)

Yes, it works for me on NVidia hardware under Linux, too.

What's interesting is that the hardware requirements for the virtual background seem to be higher under Linux than under Win10.

As of very recently, like within the past month, same here. They rolled out just a simple blurred background slightly earlier. Running latest Pop! OS.

I've had luck by adding OBS to the setup. OBS connects to the real webcam and microphone, does whatever magic I want, and exposes the results as a virtual webcam that Zoom uses.

I eventually stopped using OBS because it was overkill, but it worked very well.

Are you using Wayland? My wife saw functions disappear with a recent Zoom update on her quite old laptop, and starting her GNOME session via GNOME on X11 restored those functions.

Same audio issues here. Zoom always wants to set my mic level to 0 and change the default output source for whatever reason.

My last company used Teams which I had a much better experience with on Linux (gnome+xorg) than Zoom.

Oh, I had that problem.

Settings, Audio, uncheck Automatically adjust microphone volume.

Teams is terrible on Linux for me, but which thing is broken changes from version to version.

A few examples:

- My USB headset only works for the first call. Restarting teams let's me use it for one more call

- joining a meeting from the calendar spins forever. Doing it from the chat list works fine

- incoming calls don't ring my Linux teams, but ring everywhere else

- the settings for setting which device to use rarely have any effect; I can use any pulse mixer to switch though

Or that it presumably makes use of override_redirect, as it escapes the X WM decorations, and draws its own windows not fitting in to the style of one's WM.

That is then made worse if one uses the ability to pop out a chat in a new window, such that it is very difficult to see the popped out chat.

I've resorted to always running the web version in a Chromium instance, that being the only way to make its UI usable.

Oddly enough, the macOS client is a bit more usable, but I've not tried popped out windows there.

Over and above that, it seems to be a bandwidth hog while just sitting there watching an idle chat/team/channel.

Something I'd not use if it hadn't been adopted as the corporate "solution" at $EMPLOYER.

on the mute button, there's a tiny arrow you can click to select your audio device and microphone. you shouldn't have to restart zoom for this (but yes I have had this issue too although it seems to have gotten better).

another thing zoom does to me is mute my mic whenever i switch a session/join a breakout room, but there's an option to disable it controlling the mic in the zoom settings to fix that one

Most people uses intel igpus no? There's a good nvidia population but it's not the majority, especially in a work environment. The good news is that Nvidia has finally decided to fix its drivers, it's still beta though.

Thank you, that's a fair point. I was only considering the AMD vs Nvidia marketshare.

> The good news is that Nvidia has finally decided to fix its drivers, it's still beta though.

Can you elaborate on that?

I assume GP was thinking of Nvidia having started to work on the GBM API, available starting with nvidia 495.44: https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/181274/en...

I think there's a little irony there, considering that the same update that introduced GBM also created a pretty terrible issue where Nvidia would flood your DBUS channels with garbage until you system runs out of memory and crashes.

In other words, "fix" is a relative term.

This should give a rough idea of the order of events:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-G...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-21....

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4...

These are very helpful, thanks!

The vast majority definitely isn't running Linux with a 3080. I've been running Wayland for 5 years on Gnome on AMD and Intel GPUs without issues.

I wasn't claiming the vast majority were running a 3080, merely that they were running an nvidia card. I mentioned the 3080 to demonstrate that the FPS problems were not a matter of old hw. Regardless, I was wrong on this because I wasn't considering integrated gpu's.

> the vast majority of hardware

3080 is definitely not the vast majority of hardware.

The vast majority of hardware is:

- older

- a lot of Laptop integrated graphics

- a lot of less expensive graphic cards

Like, I just went and took a look at the price of a 3080 in Germany, no joke it's 1.500€+ on Amazone and Ebay. That is 50%+ more then most people can/want to afford to spend for there whole computer!

In the steam survey it has 1.16% usage, and as a game related Survey it's already biased in it's favor as all the "simple office work only" systems won't even show up there.

I wouldn't be surprised if for Zoom relevant usage it's more like 0.2% (as it includes many more "office focused" systems then gaming systems) or so. So kinda irrelevant?

If anyone cares:

All RTX 3000 GPUs (both non-TI an TI) together are around 11.4%.

Which sounds like quite a bit.

But again this are systems wit Steam installed.

This is just an Nvidia issue, they spent years trying to push their own driver model and have only recently come around.

>> I still cannot run a Wayland session on my machine w/ an nvidia 3080 with the latest drivers.

You might try buying hardware that has proper Linux support. That would include graphics from AMD or Intel, and might even include Apple before nvidia gets it together.

They are probably running a distro with an old kernel and can't be "bothered" to figure out and fix the actual issue.

I was aware that AMD had officially supported open source linux drivers, and that Nvidia did not support Wayland. Unfortunately, I needed a machine which would work well with the existing machine learning ecosystem, and that means getting an nvidia card over AMD. It's pretty terrible that the machine learning ecosystem is centered around nvidia hardware.

Yeah, 15 years ago it was nvidia for Linux because they were the only ones with functioning graphics drivers even if they were closed source. Now it's similar for ML on Linux even though for regular graphics the situation has reversed. I suppose many new areas start out with proprietary solutions and become more open and standardized over time?

Has anyone tried using an AMD card for desktop/Wayland alongside an Nvidia card for ML/CUDA? Especially with Sway?

I use Sway/AMD for desktop but all the photogrammetry software out there requires CUDA. It's a bit of a PITA.

It can work but generally you either have performance issues or less library support or run into more operational pains. I mainly work on building library tooling over tensorflow. Losing support for good number of operations is not something that I could reasonably consider. Also cloud amd gpu support is near non-existent and most of my company's compute relies on the cloud. t4 pricing is very nice on gcp.

Like AMD rocm exists for ml, but is very far behind cuda in support/libraries for ml. I don't think any moderate investment in AMD gpus is likely to catch up, so I'm pretty pessimistic of AMD being a good solution for ML usage anytime in the next several years.

I think a hobbyist who already owns an AMD card and wants to do basic ML is only situation I'd consider it. Any other situation and I'd strongly advise against it.

Sorry, I think you misunderstood. This is installing both types of card in the same computer: one for desktop/Wayland (AMD), and the other for ML/CUDA (Nvidia).

> and that Nvidia did not support Wayland

Nvidia does support Wayland.

For KDE, the issue is: https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qtwayland/-/merge_requests/24

You'll have to wait until that gets to your distribution to have a usable KDE experience with NVIDIA on Wayland. In general, if you use those GPUs, please use the latest distributions.

While this doesn't detract from your argument given the timelines; if you're on Arch, try again. I believe it was yesterday that the one major Qt fix that made Wayland KDE usable on Nvidia landed.

Apparently Sway too has worked fine since the release of Nvidia drivers with GBM support. I'm on AMD right now so can't confirm.

As an nvidia hostage I can confirm that arch and sway works.

(currently works out of the box with nouveau, I think I previously had to mess around with the proprietary driver and wayland-eglstreams. That stopped working around when the new driver with GBM support was released I think. uninstalling the eglstreams and switching to nouveau fixed it)

> nvidia 3080... vast majority of hardware out there

Uhm, no. Nvidia GPUs are not the vast majority. Unless you are gamer and talking about other gamers, then it might be right, but otherwise, Intel is the wast majority and Intel has had Wayland working fine since forever now.

Intel is not alone in this, either. My AMD Vega64 was running Wayland fine since I bought it in 2017. So if your Nvidia has a problem, ask the people you paid your money to, when they want to solve it.

Vast majority? I just searched for "laptop" on BestBuy and didn't see a single nvidia GPU in three page scrolls.

Using Linux is not a practical decision. It is an ethical/moral decision or simply just because you like tinkering. That's fine. I like getting shit done.

But then, getting mad because your favourite closed source company doesn't support Linux well is a little ridiculous. Zoom works fine on macOS and Windows. Linux is always bound to have issues one way or another, and if that's not enough, there's not even an incentive for developers to do things the right way, so get over it.

I run 300 fps with a nvidia card in counterstrike using wayland and gnome, so perhaps it's not the driver that is your problem.

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