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Dunno, every single major problem I had in the last couple of years (including few month on windows) were caused by bad AMD drivers. Had to switch to wayland in large part to avoid that goddamn hw_done/flip_done timeout bug. And still, if anything tries to use VA-API it freezes the entire desktop with
amdgpu_cs_ioctl reports "not enough memory for command submission". And it also recently started to not recognize the monitor plugged into it after booting, sayingkernel: workqueue: dm_irq_work_func [amdgpu] hogged CPU for >10000us 4 times, consider switching to WQ_UNBOUND, so I have to re-plug it a few times for it to start working.Nvidia, on the other hand? Not a single hitch so far.
the only problems i’ve ever faced with nvidia drivers is when i downloaded the wrong ones back on day 1. adobe software and kernel level anticheat are the real culprits
I managed to get hibernate working on opensuse with an Nvidia card, so I guess I’m lucky as hell.
No way I’m configuring that. It needs to position the same amount of space as your ram amount right?
I’ll just sleep or turn it off.
I made a dedicated hibernate partition on nvram, and gave it enough space for my cpu RAM and the DRAM, plus like ten percent. In the opensuse setup you give it a particular name, then you look up the right kernel config parameter and boom done.
This is even with the Nvidia drivers.
I was shocked too. I decided to that that after faffing around trying to get sleep working. 😄
It’s fucking hilarious that this has been going on since I started playing with Linux in the mid 00s.
Hilarious to see this after my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install booted to a black screen (with a cursor) and no TYY access after a 16 GB update. X_X lol.
Oh well. Been here before, thank God for BTRFS and Snapper integration! Probably just gotta freeze that Nvidia driver again for like a week. Blah.
When it works, I agree with some other posters here: It works fine. My only graphics issues have been “doesn’t boot into graphics environment and
Nvidia-smisays ‘We ain’t found shit.’” LOLOtherwise it’s a LOT better than it’s been. I haven’t had to go chasing down obscure issues.
I mean, Nvidia drivers have been shitty on windows too as of late
My Nvidia driver has worked flawlessly in Fedora for the past 3 years. Not a single issue.
The people who are yapping about this kind of stuff literally haven’t even looked around or explored any of the options. Nvid drivers running flawlessly for years.
Sure bro, all the endless people having issues with those shitty drivers are at fault. Nvidia is making a whole new driver because they just love to do it, not because the old one is a huge mess.
I’m doing my best helping family and friends with these things on various distros, but by now they all moved over to AMD or Intel or are in the process of it; even swapping out RTX 3000 series cards because the driver keeps fucking up and the Wayland support is a hot mess. Every single time the constant issues and glitches vanished once the Nvidia was thrown out. Nvidia on Linux is just hot garbage.
I mean, if there are working drivers that don’t have issues, and you’re using those that do, it’s not entirely your fault, but also it’s your fault.
ugh even worse if you have a hybrid laptop. integrated amd and discrete nvidia.
Kids, learn from me, do NOT buy an ASUS ROG Strix. less than 5 years old and thing is already on its deathbed with constant reboots and hanging at POST.
ProArt here with AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU. Zero issues on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Just upgraded yesterday.
I’ll do you one better: do not buy ANYTHING made by Asus. That stuff’s built to fail as fast as possible.
As a single data point to the contrary, I’ve been an ASUS guy for 15 years and always recommend to friends and family. I have an ROG Ally, all my Mboards are ASUS, same with my networking gear. I have an ASUS monitor from 2010 that my Dad still uses.
They provide more settings to tweak out of the box than most of the other tech companies in the same price range.
So far i’ve always had good luck with their motherboards, granted those are the only things from asus that i’ve bought, and my current motherboard is from 2019 i think.
yeah I learned that first hand. shit company with shit product.
I don’t think that is a function of the nvidia GPU save that ANY discrete GPU will cause increased wear on battery and heat. Also something that starts out with 6 hours battery and now has 2 is a lot less useful than something which had 10 and now has 6.
Yes I have the same on my laptop from work. It’s a Lenovo with integrated AMD, but also dedicated Nvidia for certain engineering applications that don’t play nice with integrated AMD.
Work doesn’t allow me to install Linux on the thing and some of the applications we use for work don’t run under Linux anyways. But I investigated if it would be possible, so I could decide to go pester IT asking if I could. I researched and found the same answer everywhere, it’s a pain in the ass and nothing but trouble. The main workaround is to completely disable the Nvidia chip, which obviously means not having access to that performance if required.
Would be really nice if this somewhat common use case could just work out of the box.
it is an absolute pain and honestly I wouldn’t waste your time. Wayland stuff you’ll be fine. X11? nope. And yes honestly completely disabling the discrete Nvidia GPU is the best option but depending on the distro that can also be a pain OR if your laptops BIOS ain’t shit (Asus ROG Bios IS shit) you can disable it there. or like on Arch you just pretend the thing doesn’t exist and don’t even bother installing anything for it.
Yeah hybrid laptops are a pain in the ass. don’t do it. just don’t.
Can you not just fully disabled the integrated? (At the cost of higher power usage.)
Most hybrid laptops (AFAIK) have the integrated graphics hard wired to the drive the display, since its always on
No issues on Mint though
Arch just seems to work. Though I am also not seeing a single distro in this thread listed as having issues.
I haven’t had issues in ages, with Fedora at least. My laptop has NVIDIA and my desktop has AMD. Both are pretty stable.
Regular desktop stuff and gaming usually works fine. Problems start cropping up when you try to use some more advanced GPU-powered apps, or do development yourself. I’ve encountered even older OpenGL apps that fail to start unless you force them to use the Mesa software renderer.
Yeah, usually the issue I’ve seen is when drivers are optimized for specific games to show off hardware performance and then another application or game tries to emulate that game to take advantage of that optimization, but then the optimizations change and the application now is creating conflicts and errors, just as am example. If drivers followed more open standards and optimized to those instead of trying to draw out a few more FPS to market incremental upgrades rather than all that proprietary junk, it probably would solve some of those issues. But otherwise unless the applications keep up with reverse engineering the proprietary stuff, doing that ends up binding the application to a specific driver version and/or hardware. There’s some value in optimizing specific hardware to specific software. It’s how MACs and iPhones and such have always been successful. But outside of controlled ecosystems like Apple, it is a big burden for app developers to not have reliable middle layers.
But not long ago it used to be that even just desktop environments like KDE and GNOME were super unstable on NVIDIA drivers. That seems to be a thing of the past, mostly, but older hardware does still have some of those issues and a lot of Linux users were brought to Linux to support older hardware. And so there still some bad reputation out there more than realistic expectations of a market that’s driven by today’s profit over keeping existing customers happy or future profit.
Same with Arch, they were slower to adopt Wayland but stability has been fine for the last decade.
Use Bazzite or one of its sister distros.
This is the only reason I use a "gaming* distro. They took the single biggest pain in the ass, and made sure it works out of the box. Yes, there are other challenges (immutable distros have a learning curve) but overall I’m very happy with Bazzite.
immutable distros have a learning curve
Fr, I’ve been on Bazzite for months, and I learned last month that /usr/local isn’t protected, which is now how I’ve installed mergerFS
I’m having no trouble on mine on CachyOS thankfully. Playin my games just fine. I’m sad I didn’t kick Microslop sooner, it’s been great honestly with all the tinkering and control I have. Not only did I get a performance lift, but my PC actually feels…like it’s mine I guess?
Y’all I would happily take all yalls nvidia GPUs.
(Slackware has made using nvidia drivers easy for so long now I’m surprised the other distros haven’t fucking figured it out.)
Every distro makes this easy. Every single one. Some have to enable a separate repo for all proprietary shit which is the limit of the challenge.
But kernel upgrades? That’s where I’ve broken mine and gave up
Everyone on earth already uses DKMS for this installing a new kernel or driver triggers a rebuild.
The common fails are
- User has neither disabled secure boot nor set it up to accept to sign with a key your motherboard is configured to accept.
You MUST do one or the other
- User is using very new kernel with very old hardware. Support window is about 10 years for mainline. Legacy for 1-3 years. Beyond 11-13 years you are either using old kernels or third party patches.
Ex: Geforce 600 series from 2012 is stuck with nvidia driver version 470.x latest release 2024. Attempting to build against recent kernels released after 2024 may not work without patches but MAY work with up to 7.0 as of this message. See
The problem is not “using the drivers”. It’s the driver quality.
Elaborate? Cause I can use the nvidia GPGPU stuff so much easier than amd and their fucked rocm (I want that to succeed so bad)
The compute part of Nvidia’s proprietary driver stack is fine. That is what they historically have been putting their resources and effort towards, since their big customers only care about compute.
The graphics part of the stack is where the problems are.
- Up until Wayland, they were bypassing the kernel’s standard GPU initialization path and using their X server implementation to do everything instead.
- As far as gaming goes, is is unable to utilize the graphics hardware as efficiently as on Windows. More time is spent stalling/blocking, as evidenced by lower power draw and performance.
- Their QA is awful. There was an issue with GTK 4 apps freezing when closed. They fixed it, and then the next driver release reintroduced it.
Their transparency and community involvement outside of the kernel mailing lists is also pretty poor. They read peoples’ bugs reports and feature requests on their forums, but they rarely acknowledge them or give status updates.
Ooh thank you for elaborating. I hope that the opening of their drivers would solve some of those issues. And we can finally have things working nicely
Am I the only one who has no problems with Nvidia drivers?
There’s a lot of PTSD from linux users in the before-time.
Don’t get me started on trying to compile 3Com network drivers.
The funny thing is that for a long time nvidia was the GPU brand to get on Linux because ATI (now AMD) drivers were just as closed but sucked ass.
I remember specifically buying an Nvidia GPU in 2009 because their proprietary driver was awesome and could do multi monitors properly using their proprietary X11 extension called TwinView
Imo back in the days amd wasn’t any better
It was actually worse until they open sourced their drivers.
I have an almost 20-year old laptop with an nvidia card as old as it is. I’m running Mint on it and never encountered any issues with it in particular. To be fair, using Mint also probably made it less of a headache as it sorted out the drivers automatically during setup.
It depends on both the hardware and distro. I got a laptop RTX 3070 and depending on the distro I got different problems.
On Linux mint, running some games in full screen will freeze the main screen
On fedora KDE/Nobara, you can have an incompatible kernel version getting installed as an update, borking the system.
On nix os KDE, blender doesn’t want to render anything after waking from sleep (may be a blender issue.)
@RustyNova @MyNameIsRichard
>On nix os, blender doesn’t want to render anything after waking from sleep (may be a blender issue.)seems to be cuda issue. On my machine cuda sometimes refusing to work after sleep, requiring some ‘node restart’
Might be fixed by disabling modeset (nvidia-drm modeset=0), or by blocking display server from using nvidia drm node (if display output does not use nvidia)Meh. I actually like it because it reminds me to save the file.
Although nice domain name lol
Yeah I’ve experienced the nobara issue a few times
Yeah on fedora or any other rolling distros you’ve got to look it up online if an Nvidia driver has been released before upgrading the kernel. I always forget to do that and I’m forced to touch grass for a few days until the driver gets released.
Personally that was a deal breaker for me. After a long day at work, coming back to chill out and do some blender only to find out your setup is booked and now you have to fix the system, it really gets on you.
Thankfully I had an old Linux mint partition I never cleaned up (Too lazy), so I could have continue, but the average user would just go “fuck Linux. Going back to windows”.
Yes I switched to bazzite on by gaming PC for that reason. Works really well and I can always play my games without that fear, or the annoyance of windows. I always recommend bazzite to new users for this reason.
Fedora works really well on my laptop tho
I’m not a big gamer (and factorio doesn’t have the full screen issue) so I still use mint, but I’m gradually switching to nixos. Works better… If you add the correct config for game scope and the rest (easily found on the wiki)
I’m still at least a year away from falling down the nixos rabbit hole, but I can hear it calling to me. Good luck tho
Lot’s of circlejerking online. I have no doubt that some people have issues while having an nvidia card, and I also have no doubt that in some cases the driver might be to blame.
But unless you fiddle things, go out of your way to “optimize things” by following some random posts or something like that, most common distros handles nvidia drivers properly. The same usual disclaimers applies though; being “bleeding edge” means you’ll cut yourself, and all that.
For people that just install a system (and I mean something well known to work, not “the latest craze you absolutely have to replace everything with”, it’s fine. They (nvidia) even ironed out most of wayland issues for a while now. There are still some minor lingering issues, but nothing most average users will notice.
I wouldn’t say my setup is that unusual: two monitors and a nvidia GPU from the 2010s. But I am stuck on Ubuntu 24.04 because it still has xorg – my graphics card is not supported well on Wayland. I actually downgraded from 25.10 back to 24.04 to solve some wild display lag problems.
Yeah, no… If the most basic stuff like controlling your fan speed is broken for literal years (utility needed root permissions, yet using su or sudo made it crash), that’s not some fault of users having too esoteric demands but pure and simple Nvidia idiocy.
Can you link us to the bug thread?
Minor lingering issues like DP displays not consistently waking up after sleep without a hard power cycle, VRR and HDR being essentially unsupported, and basic driver functions like frame rate limits not working?
Your average users might notice some of that…
Running Debian 13 with a 3060ti with Nvidia drivers, 3 monitors mixed DP and HDMI, and as far as I can tell those all work just fine. Save for the VRR, I haven’t tested that at all.
I had a problem on my work laptop with them about five years ago, but rolling back fixed it. Never on my personal machines.
Edit: TBF, I’ve never had a personal laptop with an nVidia card. I generally prefer to build my own desktops, though I do have a laptop. It has an AMD GPU, also with no problems.
I’m gaming on grandpa Debian using nVidia’s CUDA repository for driver updates and I’m sitting fat and happy. Ignore instructions to install kernel headers for your specific kernel and just use the
linux-headers-amd64meta-package and it will automatically install new headers when the kernel updates. DKMS will rebuild the nvidia module for the new kernel and now kernel and nvidia driver updates are seamless. Performance is not noticeably different from when I was on Windows.The only improvement at this point would be kernel-level integration like AMD has so I don’t need to add a repository, but aside from that I honestly don’t see room for improvement.
Yes. Don’t brag.
In all seriousness I haven’t used nvidia for ~ 6 years. Back then my issues on nvidia were periodic updates breaking, or with multi monitors. On amd ive never had a driver update break…ive also switched to a single very large 4k so that may also help.
No, they work just fine for me on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. They load and compile in updates and that’s all there is.
I switched to Linux because the nvidia drivers on windows got so bad my GPU was crashing once every boot. On Linux I regularly have significantly worse performance (especially in VR) but its more stable. I’m fine with a lower fps rather than just getting kicked out of games when the driver crashes.
Would be nice if they worked on those performance issues, though.
No issues here either, I screwed up a driver update leaving Debian repos to actual Nvidia repos but other than that no issues
I’ve had a bastard of a time with Nvidia drivers in the past few weeks, though I’m honest enough to accept that a big chunk of that could well be a combination of user error, and that I have a fairly old 1060 GPU.
It’s the 1060. They still work, I’ve got one in my server, but I couldn’t get mine to run with recent drivers.
I’ve got a really old one, a 1060 or 1070 I forgot. Zero issues
Since I started using arch I’ve been fine. Ubuntu was rough though. Since Ubuntu and derivatives are mostly considered beginner friendly I can see how it might be a bigger issue. Maybe it is also a problem with older cards that don’t get as many updates.
2-3 years ago when I tried Fedora (I think shortly before Fedora 41 released)? Yeah, after a few hours of figuring out how to get them installed I had serious screen artifact issues still, and ultimately ended up back on Windows.
Trying Bazzite a couple months ago with the drivers preinstalled and functional out of the box? No problems since then, games just work (except Crimson Desert for a month, but I didn’t actually care to play it so that was fine), and I can actually focus on learning Linux without stressing over whether I can play my games.
nah i used mint for years with nvidia, it got good at least a couple years ago. i still have a thinkpad with nvidia running ultramarine, and i haven’t thought about the drivers even once after installing.
on the dumber side of the fence, sister was complaining about nvidia drivers being shitty on winslop, now she switched to amd and the drivers are way shittier.
funny how it turned this way.
Nope. Zero issues here on three different machines.
Drivers can be weird though and small differences can be all it needs to cause massive issues.
Yes it never worked right. Specially in all shitty laptops with a discrete nvidia card and how they all had different ways to be integrated. At least for personal laptops I only buy ones with simple integrated graphics, but was always a shitty situation with work laptops. It was particularly fun knowing that the hdmi port was only connected to the nvidia card so if I disabled the nvidia card on the bios basic shit like that wouldn’t work. Let’s not even mention how it was constantly crashing for sleep or when waking up.
Nvidia drivers have worked fine for me on Mint, Parrot, and Artix. The only downside is they are pretty bloated and want to be loaded early in the boot process, so it adds several seconds to the initramfs load.
I haven’t tried compiling the image without them, mostly because it’s only a few seconds on boot and I don’t enjoy repairing broken boot images.
Using Fedora - sometimes akmods fails to build the kernel module after a kernel update, but that’s fixed with a single command (
sudo akmods --rebuild --force) and a reboot. Besides that, it’s been rock solid.On OpenSUSE I had constantly problems. But I heard that they release Kernel updates faster and sometimes the NVidia driver isn’t ready yet for the new kernel.
It might have been another story with the old driver architecture…
It’s been fairly good for me on bazzite with my Nvidia card. I have to set some launch options in Steam from time to time to make HDR work but otherwise I’m happy (I had Nvidia issues on a different machine using Ubuntu but switched to different drivers and things improved)
No.
