How is the NVIDIA driver situation on Linux these days? I built a new desktop with an AMD GPU since I didn't want to deal with all the weirdness of closed source or lacking/obsolete open source drivers.
That said, my previous experience with the DKMS driver stuff hasn't been bad. If you use Nvidia's proprietary driver stack, then things should generally be fine. The worst issues are that Nvidia has (historically, at least; it might be different for newer cards) refused to implement some graphics features that everybody else uses, which means that you basically need entirely separate codepaths for Nvidia in window managers, and some of them have basically said "fuck no" to doing that.
So... not perfect, but it works.
I haven’t tried wayland yet. Sounds like it might be time soon given other comments in this thread.
https://github.com/aaronp24/nvidia-versions
See: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9355fa86e6f27422963132...
You could also opt to use the latest driver instead of stable: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nvidia
Version 555.58.02 is under “latest” in nixos-unstable as of about three weeks ago[1]. (Somebody should check with qyliss if she knows the PR tracker is dead... But the last nixos-unstable bump was two days ago, so it’s there.)
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/4e15c4a8ad30c02d6c26...
Do you know something I don't? I'd love to be on the latest version.
I should have written my post better, it implies that 555 does not exist in nixpkgs, which I never meant. There's certainly a phrasing that captures what I'm seeing more accurately.
(Still on 550.)
The thing is, AFAIU, NVIDIA has several release channels for their Linux driver[1] and 555 is not (yet?) the "production" one, which is what NixOS defaults to (550 is). If you want a different degree of freshness for your NVIDIA driver, you need to say so explicitly[2]. The necessary incantation should be
hardware.nvidia.package = config.boot.kernelPackages.nvidiaPackages.latest;
Thanks for the additional info, this HM thread has helped me quite a bit.
Having the ability to keep alternate configurations for $previous_kernel and $nvidia_stable have been super helpful in diagnosing instead of rolling back.
Maybe NVIDIA drivers have kind of worked on 12 month old kernels that Ubuntu on average uses.
The problem with comments like this is that you never know if you will be me or you on your graphics card or laptop.
I have tried nvidia a few times and kept getting burnt. AMD just works. I don't get the fastest ML machine, but I am just a tinkerer there and OpenCL works fine for my little toy apps and my 7900XTX blazes through every wine game.
If you need it professionally than you need it, warts an all. For any casual user that 10% extra gaming performance needs to weighed against reliability.
A mechanic might say "This car has never given me a problem" because the mechanic doesn't consider cleaning an idle bypass circuit or adjusting valve clearances to be a "problem". To 99% percent of the population though, those are expensive and annoying problems because they have no idea what those words even mean, much less the ability to troubleshoot, diagnose, and repair.
This might provide you a suggestion that alternate manufacturers should be considered.
I have confirmed this to be the case on Google and Bing, so DuckDuckGo and Startpage will also exhibit this phenomena.
If you think they're wrong, be sure to let them know.
So you see now why that's not very relevant to end-users experiences they were talking about?
That's the only way they would be disagreeing with me.
On plenty of distros "I want to install it and forget about is reasonable" and on both Gentoo and Ubuntu I have rebooted from a working system into a system where the display stopped working, at least on Gentoo I was ready because I broke it somehow.
I think it also got so much better over time, I've been using Linux since debian woody (22 years ago) the stuff you had to deal with back then heavily skews my perspective on what users today see as unacceptable brokenness in the Nvidia driver.
That's the opposite of my experience. I'd love to support open-source. But the AMD experience is just too flaky, too card-dependent. NVidia is rock-solid (maybe not for Wayland, but I never wanted Wayland in the first place).
My nvidia problems are generally software and update related. The NVidia stuff usually works on popular distros, but as soon anything custom or a surprise update happens then there is a chance things break.
Black screens, X server crashes, OpenGL programs either crashing or running slow. Just general unreliability. Different driver versions seemed more reliable than others, which meant I was always very reluctant to upgrade, which then gives you more problems as you end up pinning old versions which then makes it harder to troubleshoot online...
> My nvidia problems are generally software and update related. The NVidia stuff usually works on popular distros, but as soon anything custom or a surprise update happens then there is a chance things break.
I mean if you run mixed versions then yeah that will work for some upgrades and not others. A decent package manager should prevent that; some distros refuse to put effort into packaging the nvidia-drivers out of principle. But if you keep the drivers in sync (which is what the official package from NVidia themselves does, it's not their fault some distros choose to explode it into multiple packages) and properly rebuild just the kernel module every time you do a kernel upgrade (or just reinstall the whole driver if you prefer), then it's rock solid.
The cards worked fine with binary drivers once the system was installed, but AFAIR, I had to integrate the binary driver packages in the Ubuntu ISO in order to boot.
I presume that now, the situation is much better, but necessiting binary drivers can be a problem in itself.
The only "trick" is I'm still on X11 and probably will stay. Note that I did try wayland on few occasions but I steered away (mostly due to other issues with it at the time).
Wayland is even worse mess than it normally is. Used to flicker real bad before 555.58.02, less so with the latest driver - but still has some glitches with games. A bunch of older Electron apps still fail to render anything and require hardware acceleration disabled. I gave up trying to make it all work - can't get rid of all the flicker and drawing issues, plus Wayland seems to be a real pain in the ass with HiDPI displays.
X11 sort of works, but I had to entirely disable DPMS or one of my monitors never comes back online after going to sleep. I thought it was my KVM messing up, but that happened even with a direct connection... no idea what's going on there.
CUDA works fine, save for the regular version compatibility hiccups.
Wayland is mostly fine, though i get some windowframe glitches when maxing them to the monitor and a another issue that i'm pretty sure is wayland but it has obnly happened a couple of times and it locks the whole device up. I cant prove it yet.
I am using only Linux or FreeBSD on all my laptop, desktop or server computers.
On desktop and server computers I did not ever have the slightest difficulty with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, either for OpenGL or for CUDA applications or for video decoding/encoding or for multiple monitor support, with high resolution and high color depth, on either Gentoo/Funtoo Linux or FreeBSD, during the last two decades. I also have AMD GPUs, which I use for compute applications (because they are older models, which still had FP64 support). For graphics applications they frequently had annoying bugs, unlike NVIDIA (however my AMD GPUs have been older models, preceding RDNA, which might be better supported by the open-source AMD drivers).
The only computers on which I had problems with NVIDIA on Linux were those laptops that used the NVIDIA Optimus method of coexistence with the Intel integrated GPUs. Many years ago I have needed a couple of days to properly configure the drivers and additional software so that the NVIDIA GPU was selected when desired, instead of the Intel iGPU. I do not know if any laptops with NVIDIA Optimus still exist. The laptops that I bought later had video outputs directly from the NVIDIA GPU, so there was no difference between them and desktops and the NVIDIA drivers worked flawlessly.
Both on Gentoo/Funtoo Linux and FreeBSD I never had to do anything else but to give the driver update command and everything worked fine. Moreover, NVIDIA has always provided a nice GUI application "NVIDIA X Server Settings", which provides a lot of useful information and which makes very easy any configuration tasks, like setting the desired positions of multiple monitors. A few years ago there was nothing equivalent for the AMD or Intel GPU drivers, but that might have changed meanwhile.
My prediction is that it will continue to improve if only because people want to run nvidia on workstations.
Also tearing is a bitch. Still. Even with ForceCompositionPipeline.