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Comment by treprinum | Hacker News Reader

Maybe my experience is vastly different, but Nvidia just works. I have a laptop with 3080, a Threadripper with 2x3090 and an Intel with a 4090 and A6000 and it works without any fuss in Linux (I mostly use it for Deep Learning but sometimes gaming as well).

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> but Nvidia just works

Not really. On some/several/many Nvidia cards (I had a few), one can't even boot with a stock Ubuntu CD, because Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD.

AMD's drivers are at least open source and integrated in the kernel. On the other hand though, having owned several Nvidia and AMD cards, I didn't find any brand to be noticeably more stable than the other (each one had issues).

> Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD.

In my opinion an open-source driver not written by Nvidia and an Ubuntu ISO not packaged by Nvidia aren't indicators of Nvidia "just work"ing or not. There are many distros where Nvidia drivers come installed out of the box.

In my opinion, formed from over two decades of Linux, a piece of hardware having a libre driver written for it is the exact indicator of what can be relied upon to "just work". The last proprietary graphics driver I ran was fglrx for a laptop R1400. One day AMD/ATI just straight up removed that card from the driver, with the newer driver being required for the newer X, unilaterally declaring my laptop obsolete. Never again.

(where I can help it. Mobile is obviously a forced-obsolescence dumpster fire)

> In my opinion, formed from over two decades of Linux, a piece of hardware having a libre driver written for it is the exact indicator of what can be relied upon to "just work".

Then this opinion can be discarded as not grounded in reality. In order to run pytorch at high speed I need to do... basically nothing. It just works.

Many things can be said about ROCm support for 7900XT, none of them are positive. "It just works" drivers from AMD come several months too late.

fglrx was pretty nightmareish itself 15+ years ago

nvidia driver on the contrary has always been reliable

Twitter and Reddit were pretty reliable, too. Needlessly putting yourself at the mercy of a company, especially for say your main computer, seems like a recipe for waking up to headache some day, where rage posting on social media is your only recourse.

99% of people's only recourse is rage posting on social media even if the drivers are open source. Not everyone is technical enough to work on graphics drivers or want to sponsor someone else to work on it.

The point is to keep the development incentives aligned with your incentives, and for it to occur within the wider ecosystem, such that cross-purposes problems don't happen in the first place.

According to multiple sources, Ubuntu has more than 30% of the market share; independently how it is, it definitely has a lot of weight in the Linux world, and its practices/standards.

I just did a fresh Arch install last week. Running 6.4.1 kernel on a ThreadRipper CPU with an RTX 2070 Super and an RTX 3060. Driver version 535.54.03 and CUDA 12.2. Everything "just works". There was no manual configuration, tweaking or hacking around needed. No issues running Wayland, Proton is handling gaming beautifully and not a sign of screen tearing.

The experience is different for everyone it seems.

Same here with a much less beefy system; I did have screen tearing (on Xorg) which was fixed by following the instructions at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting

I can play almost all single player games, whether they officially support proton or not; the only major game I have been unable to play (despite following all instructions online) is Gris.

That sounds like a bug with Ubuntu not having the proper drivers.

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