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Comment by distract8901 | Hacker News Reader

My Arch system would occasionally boot to a black screen. When this happened, no amount of tinkering could get it back. I had to reinstall the whole OS.

Turns out it was a conflict between nvidia drivers and my (10 year old) Intel integrated GPU. But once I switched to an AMD card, everything works flawlessly.

Ubuntu based systems barely worked at all. Incredibly unstable and would occasionally corrupt the output and barf colors and fragments of the desktop all over my screens.

AMD on arch has been an absolute delight. It just. Works. It's more stable than nvidia on windows.

For a lot of reasons-- but mainly Linux drivers-- I've totally sworn off nvidia cards. AMD just works better for me.

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As a counter-argument, I ran Arch Linux + nvidia GPUs + Intel CPUs between 2012 and 2020, and still run Arch + nvidia (now with AMD CPU) to this day. I won't say it has been bug free at all, but it generally works pretty well. If you find a problem in Arch that you cannot fix without reinstalling, you do not sufficiently understand the problem or Arch itself. "Installing" Arch is refreshingly manual and "simple" compared to the magic that is other Linux distros or the closed source OSes.

I tried using an Nvidia card with OBS to record my screen and it kind of freezes in Wine. I switched from x11 to Wayland and now Wine shows horizontal lines (!) and performs like crap.

Even my 4GB RX 570 from years ago gives a better experience doing this. You just install OBS from flathub, Wayland works, everything works without any setup or tinkering. You click record and you can record your gameplay footage.

I use OBS on Linux with NVIDIA card fairly regularly.

It works flawlessly.

Never used Wine + OBS, though.

Update: OBS is not broken

just ALL videos on my system are broken, I can't play back video past like half speed so the sound gets really choppy

Thanks, Nvidia

I'm sure that I could have fixed it, but I gave up after spending multiple evenings on it. Have you ever spent hours debugging a system exclusively in text mode? It isn't fun. Reinstalling the OS takes less than 30 minutes. It's a clear choice for me

Yes in fact, I have spent hours debugging a system from the console. links/lynx is a godsend. I agree though, reinstalling is certainly easier. This is more of a philosophical argument than a practical one. I installed Arch to really learn Linux, not just to get work done. If I just wanted to get work done, I'd have used Fedora, Ubuntu, or Debian.

Anyway, no judgement, just my POV.

I ran a laptop with the swappable dedicated Nvidia and integrated Intel GPU for a decade with no issues. Used to use something called Bumblebee to swap between them depending on workload, actually worked surprisingly well given the circumstances. Eventually I just dropped back to integrated only when I stopped doing anything intensive with the machine.

I run Arch as well and AMD is only "good". I would have a problem every now and then where my RX560 would lose its mind coming out of sleep and I'd have to reboot.

But the other problem that really bugs me is the "AMD reset bug" that you trip over with most AMD GPUs. This is when you pass through a second GPU through to another OS running under KVM, and is what lets you run Linux and (say) Windows simultaneously with full GPU hardware acceleration on the guest. The reset bug means the GPU will hang upon shutdown of the guest and only a reboot will let you recover the card. This is a silicon level bug that has existed for many years across many generations of cards and AMD can't be arsed to fix it. Projects like "vendor-reset" help for some cards, but gnif2 has basically given up (he mentioned he even personally raised the issue with Lisa Su). Even AMDs latest cards like the 7800 XT are affected. NVidia works flawlessly here.

I have used Pop OS and Ubuntu with NVIDIA card, and honestly, I never faced any serious problem.

After every kernel upgrade, I just have to reinstall the nvidia drivers and the cuda toolkit.

Everything works as before after I do that. I don't face any problems at all.

I'm not sure what card you have but I've never really had any major problems running Nvidia + Intel integrated graphics on Arch, Ubuntu etc.

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