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Comment by throwaway148773 | Hacker News Reader

Except if you're on Nvidia...

No.

Their GTX series cards all used proprietary blobs that required unmanageable device specific interfaces.

Starting from the RTX series cards, they still have proprietary blobs but instead of having device specific interfaces, they all use a shared public interface which makes compatibility and performance much better.

It's not across the board, but there are instances of gaming benchmarks showing more performance under linux than windows.

I'd trade half my GPU performance for the NVIDIA drivers not freezing my system on wake-up. The new half-open ones arguably made it worse, it consistently freezes now.

Then why are you using NVIDIA? The AMD open-source driver stack is very mature by now

I had switched back to Windows after years of issues with Linux drivers, I needed a new PC, and I needed CUDA for college and tinkering.

Now, it's been barely a couple of months since I reinstalled Ubuntu, and a couple of weeks since I found out the latest release runs even worse, so this is new to me. I don't plan to use Windows at home ever again, so I could sell my GPU and buy AMD, but so far I'm simply disappointed.

Ugh, that sucks. It makes sense. I'm somewhat optimistic that as the open-sourcing effort continues, more and more of NVIDIA's driver stack will be open-source and it will see significant improvements, too.

If you're using DisplayPort, try switching to HDMI. (Really.) For me it made the freezes much shorter. It's a bug in their driver related to the connected monitor(s).

That didn't occur to me! I'll give it a try, although I suspect that will break VRR for my setup.

Am currently on nvidia and have no issues with their proprietary drivers. While they aren't following the linux ethos, the software runs just fine.

Have they fixed the drivers on wayland yet?

I’ve been running on Wayland with nvidia drivers for around a year. No issues for development work. Haven’t tried gaming.

Been using Nvidia+Wayland for years now, even on an optimus laptop.

I'm convinced that many these people saying Nvidia has serious issues on Linux must be (by no fault of their own) going by habit and downloading the driver installer .bin from the Nvidia website and trying to install drivers that way. So yes, if you do that you're going to have issues.

Learn to do things the way your distro does them (use a package manager) and most problems go away.

Ubuntu-packaged NVIDIA drivers freeze my entire system on wake-up. The switch to Wayland and the new half-open drivers made it worse.

I feel I'm in the same boat. For several months I've been thinking my GPU was on its way out (it's a pretty old 2080 now). My desktop freezes randomly. I can log into it remotely but all the usb devices stop working and the screen goes blank. l took a good look at the logs and noticed a bunch of pageflip timeouts followed by usb disconnections. I later discovered the Nvidia forums seem to have many recent complaints (with similar logs) especially around their latest drivers and Plasma + Wayland compatibility.

I'm using 4070 Ti with open kernel module on Wayland.

It's MOSTLY painless. Some GNOME extensions seem to randomly hang everything on startup (I'm currently investigating which ones, I believe Dash to Dock and/or Unite are to blame) and there's a weird issue with VR when streaming via ALVR: SteamVR launches, but games crash unless I disable the second monitor (no such issues with WiVRn, so not entirely sure if it's a driver problem or not)

Besides that in my daily driving I saw no other issues.

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