I see these complains from time to time and I never understand them.
I've literally been running nvidia on linux since the TNT2 days and have _never_ had this sort of issue. That's across many drivers and many cards over the many many years.
I've literally been running nvidia on linux since the TNT2 days and have _never_ had this sort of issue. That's across many drivers and many cards over the many many years.
Your statement makes no sense. It's like a smoker claiming that since he didn't die of lung cancer, smoke is 100% safe.
Nvidia has 80% market share of the discrete GPU desktop market and at least 90% market share of cloud/datacenter.
Nvidia GPUs are used almost exclusively for every cloud powered AI service and to train virtually every ML model in existence. Almost always on Linux.
Do you really think any of this would be possible if what you are describing was anything approaching the typical experience starting at the /driver/ level?
Nvidia would have never achieved their market dominance nor held on to it this long if the issues you’ve experienced impacted anything approaching a statistically significant number of users or applications.
Nvidia gets a lot of hate on HN and elsewhere (much of it fair) but I will never understand the people who claim it doesn’t work and get the job done (often very well).
Gaming users may tolerate some flakiness for their hobby but these AI companies dealing in the nine-figure range (minimum) absolutely do not.
But I can promise you after reading things like the LKML for decades and a number of different Microsoft blogs, that everyone on this planet experiences flakiness issues at times and has to figure out how to adjust their workload to avoid it until the issue is discovered and fixed.
Actually, no. Obviously they have Nvidia support but in one especially obscure issue he was describing Meta took it as an internal challenge and put three teams on it in competition. Naturally his team won (of course) ;).
Of course all software has flakiness - I'm not taking the ridiculous position that Nvidia is the first company in history to deliver perfect anything.
What I am saying is these anecdotal reports (primarily from Linux desktop hobbyists/enthusiasts) of "It's broken, it doesn't work. Nvidia sucks because it locked up my patched kernel ABC with Wayland XYZ on my bleeding edge rolling release and blah blah blah" (or whatever) are extreme edge cases and in no way representative of 99% of the Nvidia customer base and use cases.
Show me anything (I don't care what it is) and I'll find someone who has a horror story about it. Nvidia gets a lot of heat from the Linux desktop situation over the years and some people clearly hold an irrational hatred and grudge.
Nvidia isn't perfect but it's very hard to argue they don't deliver generally working solutions - actually best of breed in their space as demonstrated by their overwhelmingly dominant market share I highlighted originally.
1. They supported linux when no one else did, 2. I've never experienced instability from their drivers, and as I mentioned before, I've been running their cards under linux since the TNT2 days.
Which is literally only 1% of users anyway
My guess: something like laptop GPU switching failed badly in the nvidia binary, earning it a reputation.
There is some strange issue with some games where they don't get full performance from the dGPU, but more than the iGPU. I have to use optirun to get full performance.
It also has problems when the computer wakes from sleep. For whatever reason, hardware video decoding doesn't work after entering standby. Makes steam in home streaming crash on the client, but flipping to software decoding usually works fine.
The important part is that battery life is almost as good with bumblebee as it is with the dGPU turned off. No more fucking with Prime or rebooting into BIOS to turn the GPU back on.
Having said that - I (or rarely, other people) have almost always managed to work out those issues and get my systems to work. Not in all cases though.