It used to be that the Shield was the one bastion away from ads on Android TV, then with one update that somehow manages to reinstall itself despite being completely disconnected from the internet, there are now permanently ads on my Nvidia Shield TV.
I honestly don't know why it's such a big deal for me, but I basically never use it anymore. It's real shame, I got a lot of good use out of it, because as you mention the support has been going on for years now. But I will not subject myself to ads if I can help it. I pay for Youtube to avoid ads, I pay for Twitch to avoid ads. I can't pay to remove ads from my Android TV homescreen (that I didn't even have for the past like 5 years)
I heard on reddit that if Nvidia even hints that this is possible, they violate the license agreements with Google, and then Google is allowed to yank the play store...
The nagging in the android launcher has got more and more obnoxious recently. Half the time I open an app it asks if I want to "add it to my discover" with the only options being "yes" or "later". Infuriating.
Yes
> Are the Netflix recommendations ads too?
Yes
it's just that the tolerance towards unsolicited promotional material / ads varies from person to person.
They are ads, and I also would prefer a tastefully blank screen with none of them.
Just to add support to that post.
For mobile you can use ReVanced.
I used a 3rd party launcher but there wasn't a way (at the time) to make it the default.
As Google clearly doesn't respect your boundaries, maybe stop giving them money?
eg stop rewarding them for their current behaviour
For those, using an ad blocker won't make much difference. But I guess if the content creators important to you are relying on youtube's monetisation, they would indeed be affected.
Not sure how else to send a signal to Youtube though, as they only seem to care about revenue. Seems like there's only that one lever that can be pulled. eg "ad blocker or not?"
I loved what the Shield was, but what it is now is utterly unacceptable.
I wish they would just copy the Apple TV's home screen. All anyone needs is a grid of icons and NO ADVERTISEMENTS. There is no more room for innovation here. Stop trying to re-invent the wheel. Just admit someone else already perfected it and move on.
Experience shows that in practice they also aren't much better than Nvidia in regards to Linux.
Most discussions centered around the various linux communities seem to parrot that AMD is the way to go now because of open source drivers etc. I always wonder how much of it is an echo chamber.
(I have used AMD and NVIDIA cards, including a 4 GTX1070 cluster a few years back with mostly little issues on both. Also used GCN andRDNA1, and now I use nvidia on ubuntu for work and it just works.)
If you need OpenCL or if you go Nvidia and need the proprietary driver, it will make distros like Fedora (my favorite), Arch, etc a lot more difficult as they stay very current on kernels (which is great for hardware compatibility). Nvidia is better than AMD in this regard if you need the AMD pro then you just won't be able to run Fedora. If you don't mind Ubuntu, then you'll be ok. It's well supported for Nvidia drivers and AMD Pro.
I have been amazed at how well everything "just works" with AMD on Fedora, and for that reason AMD is my default.
(The counterargument is: if you're going to use a proprietary driver why are you switching to Linux at all?)
My next linux GPU is AMD.
Whereas I've used linux on several systems with AMD/ATi cards and they've always been flaky.
It only happens on a reboot, not while I'm using it, and only maybe once a month, but it's still annoying because I have to ssh in to reinstall the drivers every time.
And here I was all hyped that AMD would be my savior. I hope you're wrong!!
I'll find out for myself the next time I upgrade and I switch the current AMD card that I'm using on my Windows PC into the ubuntu system.
Anyway just basic stuff wasn't working and IIRC the GPU fans would stay at 100% all the time. Just terribly broken.
I'm overall happy with the .run drivers from the site except when they come up at the wrong resolution and need reinstalling as I described.
If you're manually installing them outside of Ubuntu package management then you need to reinstall them every time you upgrade your kernel. (This is a design decision by Linux to make life harder for closed source drivers, there's nothing Nvidia can do about it)
There are pros and cons of each by radeon will get you a more intel like experience.
And yes, I realize how much of a niche I inhabit.
Nvidia's whole role in life seems to be competing against standards. Everyone else heads one way, Nvidia tries to out-compete by making their own. Oh great, there's DLSS support in the new binary driver... FSR only works because AMD did it at a share-able level. FreeDesktop is making GBM? Let's invent EGLStreams & insist on that for a decade. Nvidia has no visible cooperative spirit.
AMD has good drivers, super reliable, worked on by a wide variety of the gaming/computer-graphics industry/world. There's a huge trove of Proton games that run exceedingly well & without fail: proof positive that AMD has the situation down.
Also, in my experience Nvidia works just fine on linux, you just have to install their drivers. I literally never had an issue with them, and I use it professionally and for games. AMD is probably better if you want bleeding edge updates or use a rolling release distro, but the downside is that you still have to contend with some weird driver issues that aren't magically fixed just because the code is open source.
Yes, things mostly work when you install the Nvidia Linux drivers. But even on a Ubuntu LTS I've had updates break the Nvidia driver, sleep is a 50/50 toss up whether it resumes broken too. And that's on my desktop and ignoring the giant PITA of using a laptop with hybrid graphics. Using the Nvidia drivers also greatly complicates using a Libre distro like Debian or Guix because obviously they're non-free. Plus until the past year or so Wayland has just been essentially a non-starter with Nvidia even with drivers because of their choices.
The whole power off/power on thing instead doesn't take all that long, but it would be more convenient to just have a working sleep/resume.
Secondly, good luck having a go at any compute framework offering from AMD on Linux, unless working for some research lab doing HPC.
AMD is pretty great on Linux so long as you only ever want graphics. Once you want anything else out of their very-good-on-paper hardware, the experience starts to break down. You have to manually install/uninstall/reinstall their ever-shifting compute driver(s) and which driver you install (and the cadence at which said driver is updated, particularly for newer kernels) depends heavily on the device you have. E.g. I have a 5700XT and W5700, very similar hardware, yet supported by two very different drivers (I'll let you guess which one lags much farther behind - hint, it's for the more expensive card).
In contrast, Nvidia's driver has essentially always worked - I install the same driver on all my systems, and it gets updated frequently enough that it's always compatible with the current Ubuntu kernels. Over a dozen or so machines (personal, not counting work) over the last ~15 years, I've only encountered one or two serious issues with the Nvidia driver stack. Compare that to ~5 AMD machines over the last ~6 years where I've encountered at least one major issue per machine each year with the AMD driver stack.
You can hate the company but their products are second to none.
I believe how good your TV's native upscaling will also be a factor in how improved the Shield's implementation looks.
I was midway through the series when I traveled somewhere else and used a Roku on a different TV - and it was instantly noticeable. When I got home, I plugged in a Chromecast Google TV to my TV (LG OLED) and watched parts of an episode.
The Shield TV made DS9 look significantly better.
> The Shield upscaler works, but if you have an eye for quality it is terrible. The sharpening it uses leaves a very noticeable sharpening ring around edges, most noticeable on animated content. It will also cause weird artifacts to pop up on live action content.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/11e7e2h/rtx_video_s...
Nvidia picks & chooses what to implement. If they deign do work at all. And actually open-source Nouveau is wonderful, but wow, they have like 1/20th the chip-maker resources to read-from/work-with & 1/20th the developer headcount of Intel or AMD open-source driver development. Phoronix is posting RADV stories every other week with cutting edge industry folk making this or that innovation, & Noveau shows up like quarterly maybe.
They don't do CUDA, so they're useless.
AMD GPUs are toys. As long as AMD drops the ball on ROCm, etc their cards will be relegated to gaming - quite literally a toy to many people.
Many users who are happy with "I want a GPU to drive my display and maybe game" are pleased with the current state of AMD - and that's fine. However, that population rarely goes beyond "how many FPS am I getting?". That population regularly complains about the Nvidia closed-source/binary driver situation. A lot of that criticism (from their point of view) is fair - although I've never had issues with the binary driver and as seen in this thread I'm not alone.
However, if they were to expect even just a little bit more - ML, reliable and usable hardware video encoding/decoding, etc they'd quickly realize what we have. The closed-source Nvidia driver is remarkable capable and consistent (from a functionality perspective) supporting every single feature and function of any and every card that says "Nvidia" on it across multiple platforms. From nearly decade-old laptop GPUs to the latest and greatest H100 datacenter GPU and everything in between. This is before you even get to the dozens of libraries Nvidia supports and provides (like cuDNN, TensorRT, etc) that have the same consistent, reliable, and cross-platform functionality.
Again, I understand their perspective and I don't look down on them or their simple use case (gaming on desktop) but in 2023 that's an extremely low bar. There's also a lot of criticism of the Nvidia price point - but those of us who are making full utilization of our hardware and supported features balk at that criticism. What's also interesting is the more buggy and less supported also closed-source (to my knowledge) AMD Pro driver that's required to do anything more than game. So at this point you're still not going to please the open source community and the functionality and experience is worse in every aspect.
My 4090s will not only beat AMD top of the line on just about every gaming benchmark, in seconds (or simultaneously) I can be training an ML model, encoding video, upscaling, doing realtime noise suppression, etc. The functionality fundamentally supported by that driver is amazing. When you look at it from that standpoint an Nvidia card being (at most) 3x the price point is perfectly reasonable. I'm thrilled to spend $1000 more if it means I can actually use the card for what I need and I save many, many hours of my time. In terms of total value it's not even close.
The increase in value, utility, and time returned is astounding and (to many of us) more than justifies the driver situation and cost. I support competition and have tried several times over the years to get ROCm to perform the most basic ML tasks - it's a blackhole of wasted time, energy, and effort (starting with the AMDPro driver). AMD clearly just doesn't care - and even if they decided to throw everything they have at it Nvidia has a decade-plus head start.
I truly wish the AMD software situation was better but I've been let down too many times to be hopeful I will be making anything approaching full use of any AMD GPU anytime in the near future.
So much for garbage in, garbage out.