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Comment by matja | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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