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The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.

Was/is this a distro thing, or an actual issue?

Every Nvidia I've used [1] has worked perfectly, from the change for Xfree86 to Xorg, through the Compiz desktop wobbly window craze, to the introduction of GPGPU APIs like CUDA/OpenCL and recently Vulkan.

I do recall once helping a friend setup a Debian and a Ubuntu machine with Nvidia (which I never used before) and it took some figuring-out of how to install non-free drivers, so maybe my choices of Gentoo and Arch (not being as conservative towards non-free licenses as Debian/Ubuntu) always made it a non-issue?

[1] 6800 Ultra, 7800 GTX , 7900 GTX, 8800 GTX, GTX 280, GTX 480, GTX 680, GTX 760 Ti, RTX 2080, RTX 4080... probably missed some.

I've also never had any trouble with NVIDIA on the desktop. I think most issues people have are on laptops, which have odd hybrid/dual GPU setups, and which exercise suspend/hibernate much more aggressively.

That's a good point that I hadn't considered. I've never had a laptop with Nvidia, I probably subconsciously avoided those dual GPU setups as they sounded hacky and I never really needed fast 3D on a laptop.

As far as I know dual graphics laptops are a pain no matter the OS and chips.

The one sample i know of first hand is an amd/nvidia laptop that never obeys the settings about which GPU to use. In Windows.

FWIW I have an Asus Zephyrus G14 and the dual graphics cards works pretty well in Linux in hybrid mode. It's pretty cool, certain things (games) run on the dedicated Nvidia GPU. Everything else runs on the built in AMD GPU.

I'm guessing it's because the laptops are popular enough that there's a dedicated group of people that make it work [0].

I'm still on X11, dunno what the story is like with Wayland though.

[0] https://asus-linux.org/

If you have sufficiently old Nvidia GPUs, eventually drivers and supporting software stops shipping with distros. I have a bunch of older laptops that support in Ubuntu existed for like 10 years ago, but drivers stopped being updated and Ubuntu dropped them from their repos.

We've had open source AMD drivers for... 20ish years now? Meanwhile Nvidia begrudgingly added drivers support in the last year or two. So maybe some recency bias.

nvidia x11 support has been pretty good for quite some time. It's nvidia wayland support that has been less than stellar. That has gotten better in the last year to year and a half now.

Now, I think it's no big issue so long as you are using a distro that supports up to date drivers. That should be about everyone now as I think even debian stable currently has decent drivers.

Does Nvidia need to support Wayland, or does Wayland need to support Nvidia? I.e., what is the support at the API boundary which is missing?

I'm not sure exactly what the API boundries are.

I know that Nvidia is integrated into the kernel and that wayland is talking to nvidia through the kernel. I also know that for accelerated rendering, wayland is talking directly to the nvidia drivers (bypassing the kernel? IDK).

But I also know that in the nvidia release notes, they've mentioned changes to improve support and functionality of wayland.

Same, no issues with any nVidia card going back two decades, several PC's and laptops, Linux and Windows.

It has more to do with how you're using the cards. I don't see you mention gaming at all, that's where the biggest performance penalty and lack of support is apparent.

> The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.

It could also be lucky consequence of what games you play and what else you do with your computer.

I was a long-time Nvidia user, and had plenty of problems with their drivers. They ranged from minor annoyances when switching between virtual consoles (which some people never do) to total system freezes when playing a particular game (which some people never play). It would have been be easy for someone else to never encounter these problems.

Since switching to AMD a couple years ago, I have been much happier.

I just migrated to linux (Bazzite) in March, I have a RTX 3080. The only issue I ran into was that video stream compression is not supported on linux so I can't run 1440p 165hz with HDR on because my monitor doesn't support HDMI 2.1. Either I need to turn off HDR or lower refresh rate to 120hz.

NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year, I wouldn’t consider it much less stable/supported than AMD cards.

Definitely better now with their new "opensource" driver.

I still ran in a few snags:

- DKMS can break, e.g I had a kernel bump to 6.18 or 6.19 and the nvidia driver wasn't ready yet so the build failed. A mainline driver will always win this one.

- Suspend almost always works, but sometimes fails on lid close which is of course when you can't see it fail and my laptop battery dies unexpectedly. You'd say use hybrid sleep but that reliably always fails with the nvidia driver too. Both work flawlessly with Nouveau.

Since I don't need the extra perf on this laptop I just use Nouveau to drive the the dGPU + the AMD iGPU most of the time which is powerful enough for my non-desk needs.

Agree on both counts. I use debian unstable and is usually 50/50 on whether the machine will reboot on a working display after a kernel upgrade. Very easy to fix if you have a bit of knowledge, but certainly not ready for the general public.

I don't have a laptop with an nvidia card, but I often suspend the linux gaming machine on my living room, and sometimes it doesn't come back from sleep, while my steam deck never failed to.

dude, the whole Linus sticking his finger up at nvidia meme? Its still real in 2026. The opensource ABI whatever the fuck they call it is trash. I'm absolutely ready to purchase an AMD card next GPU I buy. I don't want to give nvidia anymore money, I'm done. It'll be AMD GPUs from now on no matter the performance diff, purely because they've got a better attitude to supporting non MS deployments.

There's too much TPM/SecureBoot/Enroll key hoops you have to jump through that a lot of distros just haven't bothered with.

If I'm being completely real, I'd be running FreeBSD 15. I just could not get a working nvidia driver going in 15 and get a working X installation. Supposedly 15.1 fixes it, we'll see in June. I've always preferred the BSD design, fs layout, etc, and I would love to have a FreeBSD desktop with a wine 11 install that actually plays games.. the dream!

Nah, nvidia drivers on Linux 2026 is hands down just as easy as AMD. I’ve had no more issues than running an AMD card and everything works flawlessly. They’re 100% right at the absolutely generational improvement in nvidia drivers since they’ve released the open drivers. Linus himself straight up said anyone trying to say this stuff in current year is being super disingenuous twisting his words from ages ago and that he considers nvidia a fantastic partner nowadays. And frankly, anyone unironically trying to use X in 2026 deserves the pain, it’s been officially deprecated for a while now and they maintainers were ultra clear that the only reason to use it now is for compatibility reasons and that you should expect issues if you do. Wayland is so far ahead of X now that anyone still trying to use X is being purposefully obstinate.

Is it thanks to ML needs or is it unrelated?

> the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects

Did you remember to screw in the antennas to the motherboard?

> on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console.

This is the way.

I did the same with an ITX AMD APU system. Thankfully well before the AI crunch. Running Debian because I just want it to work. Best keyboard for this setup is the Logitech Wireless Touch K400. Audio is through an older Sony receiver driving two of the floor standing Magnepan mid size speakers with a 10" sealed sub fed by a USB DAC. Mainly for music listening so no surround. The only thing I am missing is a nice wireless game pad.

I have a low power FreeBSD server running a 20TB raid z5 which serves all my media. I don't use any software contraptions like media centers or databases. I just mount file system and open a playlist in media player like god intended. Steam just works, though I haven't really gamed on this other than testing - that is what my desktop beast is for. I had issues with Hulu or whatever streaming thing in Fire Fox but had no trouble with any of them in Chrome. I know you don't get 4k but I don't care.

edit: > I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard

When I first setup the PC I had a full wireless KB & mouse, installed Half Life lost coast and played the demo using a TV table as a stand in front of the couch. NOT ideal but would work better with a proper adjustable TV table/tray thing. My friend has one and used it to work from home on his big ass 80+ inch TV.

I use an 8bitdo controller and they work very good in linux, I use the dongle instead of the bluetooh connection

I have an 8bitdo Pro 2 and it's... kinda okay? 90% of the time it works great, but if I don't have an application running which looks for a controller then the controller gets disconnected and reconnected every 10 seconds or so.

If you haven't tried it, the Steam controller does a pretty good job of playing mouse&keyboard games. The original is probably hard to find now, but allegedly they'll release a new one later this year.

Keyboard & mouse user here. To lessen the pain, I moved to gyro-based gaming. I think 8bitdo has those. I specifically use the Switch joycons. I recommend you just get yourself a good BT dongle.

Me too. My weapon of choice is the Dualsense. Lots of great things about it in addition to gyro controls: as of late last year you can pair 4 devices with it. I have one Dualsense and roam between PS5, Bazzite desktop and Steam Deck seamlessly.

How do you use the gyro sensors to play? I looked into it before but couldn’t wrap my mind around how we’re supposed to do that.

If you're asking how it's setup/configured, then Valve ships "Steam Input" that can do a lot of things and one of them is translating gyro data to mouse events.

Some games support gyro directly, but even then AFAIK people prefer Steam Input due to how configurable it is.

More like, how does gyro help you play some games?

With controller sticks you control the 3D camera only indirectly -- by telling the rotation velocity (in very limited range) and for how long to apply it.

With gyro you have 1:1 proportional camera position input, like with mice.

It's more or less about possibility of developing muscle memory. With (linear) gyro/mice you could sharply snap camera to a point you see on screen without much overshoot. You could turn 180 degrees in split second with eyes closed (actually with gyro people often use flick stick for such big rotations, turning instantly -- but that's besides the point)

With controller stick? Well you could try to time that 180 turn takes 1.5 seconds of holding at full deflection -- good luck developing a feeling for all the speeds inbetween zero and full deflection.

I have found that you have to keep it centered in order to keep it from moving/registering input, so it worked very similarly to an analog stick to me. Am I mistaken?

I guess I just need to try it some more.

If controller isn't being rotated in the moment, then camera should be stationary regardless of controller orientation, yea.

I guess you've used some strange gyro to stick emulation (never heard of such thing, but sounds like it).

Another method for gyro aim is flick stick, using the right stick to control the direction of your aim (on the left/right axis) and gyro for fine tuning and also up/down axis.

https://youtu.be/CiSS5OsNCNU from the creator explains it (and older gyro controls).

8Bitdo does have a gyro controller, I have the Ultimate 2. It does have some requirement to configure the gyro though, you have to boot it in `dinput` mode by holding down a button.

I have included a link from my notes, I have not actually tested it much beyond seeing that the gyro does work in steams "configure controller" thing, never got around to correctly mapping any game.

https://pastebin.com/YP4CD6BX

The Steam Controller will be such a blessing when it comes out.

You can get dongles for pretty much any controller you like.. Switch Pro, Wii U, Xbox etc. It's generally more stable than using bluetooth on a controller that supports it, especially if you position the dongle to have clear sight to your couch.

what surprised me is how Proton works under the hood... no emulation at all!

wine translates win API -> Linux. Then DXVK converts DirectX calls into Vulkan in real time, and VKD3D-Proton for DX 12. so it always native Vulkan.. no wonder performance is even better than in windows!

this laid it out it for me visually - https://vectree.io/c/how-proton-runs-windows-games-on-linux-...

> no wonder performance is even better than in windows!

Every "benchmark" I've seen from someone claiming a game performs better on Linux via Proton than on Windows was written by someone that doesn't know anything about running benchmarks or how statistics work.

Gamers Nexus is competent, timestamp starting at 10 minute explanation of methodology: https://youtu.be/ovOx4_8ajZ8?si=Tjp82Cgi8dvcZo-p&t=704

> I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid.

Explain please?

I read online that playing games on a shared screen is better because it establishes gaming as a group/social activity.

Thanks. Believable - when my kid is glued to a tablet with another kid and they're talking about what they're seeing or doing, it makes me feel much better than when she's doind the same by herself...