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Comment by minimaul | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely don’t recognise what you’re describing - for context I have a AMD APU system (5750GE - zen 3 and vega GPU cores), and a steam deck. I’ve had the APU for over a year now. I also have a desktop with a NVIDIA 3090.

All three are stable for general desktop use on Arch Linux (so up to date kernels etc). The NVIDIA set up has massive compute advantages (CUDA), but for desktop use if anything I have fewer issues on AMD - especially relating around desktop tearing and video which is where I have the most pain with NVIDIA.

Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).

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My experience is that universally my linux gamer friends who own AMD products have worse experiences than I do - they are absolutely usable, but not worth buying at all if your primary purpose for owning a GPU is gaming.

> Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).

Most likely you are playing games that Valve has already deployed patches/hacks for. Go off the beaten path from Steam and the proton runtime and you will find quickly that AMD is severely buggy.

Black screening is especially common with vega dgpus, can't say if it extends to the igpus are not but if you google 'vega black screen bug linux' you will find hundreds of reddit posts and bug reports about this going back to 2018.

I’m playing quite a wide variety of titles - from recent AAA on the Steam Deck to really old titles that have never even been on Steam. Plus emulators for all sorts of systems - from really old up to things like GameCube/Wii or even Switch.

I can’t speak to discrete cards, but it’s been pretty reliable for me.

I’m curious as to if your friends are using distros with older Mesa/kernels? That might explain some of the disparity.

edit: for some more context - I have tried a linux desktop about once a year every year for the last decade. Every time I've bounced hard due to issues on a variety of hardware - intel only, intel CPU + nvidia GPU, intel CPU + AMD GPU, AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU, etc. Last year (feb 2022 or so) is the first time I've made it work for me for the long term, so maybe it's just that in that time it's finally got to a good point? :)

That bug was fixed over a year and a half ago.

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