I use mint on two different machines with Nvidia GPUs. One is a several year old desktop with a 1080 and the other is a two year old Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia GPU in addition to the Intel one on the processor.
Now granted I don’t play a ton of games right now, and when I do they usually aren’t cutting edge, but I don’t recall many problems so far. I use NVENC for Jellyfin and editing videos more often, and that has been pretty smooth. The one issue I had was related to that though. Kdenlive (flatpak) updated and could no longer export videos because it was looking for a newer version of something my mint-supplied nvidia driver wasn’t yet updated to have.
Trying to install a newer driver manually was a whole damn thing though, so I rolled back the kdenlive flatpak to the one that worked.
It was a horror show a decade or two back when I first tried Linux. I feel like this meme is just too late or just old.
Yeah, I used a 1070 on arch for years without any issue, recently switched over to an Intel arc gpu and that gave me way more problems (admittedly most of it was my “fault” for being on an old mbr scheme, needing to enable rebar, and needing to switch from xorg to wayland… but that’s just what happens when a graphics card is so stable you don’t feel the need to reinstall your os or change anything major). I am not hired by Nvidia nor do I support their business practices when it comes to making development on Linux difficult or creating proprietary standards like cuda, just stating my personal experience with their drivers.
i just upgraded to an AMD card yesterday because of the Nvidia driver nightmare lol
Yeah same here a few weeks ago. Glad I did though.
my only issue nowadays is stuttering on wayland.
installing it is actually pretty straightforward on ubuntu.
Probably should’ve been “installing and using nvidia drivers”.
eh, its not that bad nowadays if you arent doing anything fancy. could be better, could be worse.
ill still favor AMD on linux, but nvidia users can use linux now without that much friction. exception is maybe optimus laptops.
It’s definitely better than say a year ago, but it’s always a new small issue. Like suspend is not working, or shutting the monitor off crashes the graphics stack etc.
I really hope they get their shit together and build a solid wayland support at some (not too distant) time. But the amount of issues is small enough for me that I’ve switched to it.
they are building nvk. it seems, in typical fashion for them, they are letting the community do it. we are already using the open kernel driver and it works well, and the community is also working on reimplementing it properly.
seems like things will indeed fall into place in a not too distant time.
i’m also not having issues beyond the stutter just yet. in any case, looking forward to get my radeon back from the repair shop.
As a Linux noob I feel that lol… Currently on my Mint Laptop with an nvidia gpu (RTX 4060 Mobile version) and while most stuff worked out of the box, am running into several small annoyances:
- steam doesn’t launch (steamwebhelper doesn’t respond).
- Sleep mode just completely crashes the system once in a while.
- The GPU runs pretty warm, even if I don’t use anything / have the laptop closed.
- Tried to tinker around with the ‘nvidia-xconfig’ CLI in order to use a custom fan curve and it created a config file which completely stopped my desktop environment from even launching at startup… Somehow managed to recover the system through terminal shenanigans
To anyone thinking about switching to linux, do yourself a favor and do it on AMD hardware.
So true! Last week I did a fresh install of Mint with the recommended nvidia drivers, and only installed Brave, Steam, Discord, and Vampire Survivors on my 3080 PC… 15 FPS at best. Tried the open source nvidia drivers and, which stopped Steam from working (so weird). Re-installed steam and Vampire Survivors and still couldn’t get anything to work (even tried, and failed, to run a few other games). Boy it would be nice if nvidia put in more work to support Linux. 2025 will be the year for Team Red!
sudo apt install nvidia-driverit’s the same as installing programs on your pc, the biggest issue would be that you have to use a cli because I dont know if you can install Nvidia drivers via gui
Honestly, I’ve never had this problem. Two GPUs, two clicks in the gui driver manager.
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How can it be a skill issue if you did nothing?
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2009 called
It’s asking why things haven’t changed in 14 years
(things are somewhat better)
IT’S FIXED!
LOL isn’t that the truth. I wanted my desktop to not bother chugging watts through my 3090 and generating excess heat when barely KDE Plasma and a browser is running, but trying to set up GPU offload just left me with a blank terminal screen.
Thank God for the geniuses who implemented Snapper rollbacks in OpenSUSE! Otherwise, the Nvidia drivers in the repos work fine and I’m scared to touch them…
Is the power consumption really that much more? I guess there is a significant difference but it might still not cost much.
In a desktop you use the powerful GPU all the time.
In my use case the laptop is always attached to a charger.
Works fine for me? (opensuse tumbleweed)
Didn’t take much effort, hybrid mode got implemented automatically and then I just manually added a widget for quick switching between only integrated graphics, hybrid mode and only nvidia (basically never using that one, just either integrated or hybrid)
That’s nice! I’m glad it glad it worked so well for you. That’s the thing about configuration, sometimes it works without much effort!
I wish everyone shared your experience, but I guess it’s a YMMV kind of thing, right?
I’m generally very happy with opensuse tumbleweed, so far the best desktop distros I’ve tried. Very polished and user friendly.
pacman -S nvidia-dkmsHollywood, here I come!
Partial updates are not supported on Arch. You need to use
-Syu.Yeah, obviously, who wouldn’t know that
I thought dkms was recommended only for alternative kernels, and that nvidia or nvidia-open is what’s recommended generally.
Recommended, yes, but I’ve had issues with the pre-compiled modules before, so I switched to
nvidia-dkmsto make sure the binaries are always freshly baked.
This is actually an easy thing to do – usually. But you might get unlucky with the wrong hardware, as perhaps OP did.
I never understood this. Maybe because I stick with basic distros like Ubuntu or Mint. But I have not had this issue.
I had issues in like… 2010 or so. But not for about a decade
I haven’t had issues for about a decade. I haven’t had an nvidia card for about a decade either. I think the two may be connected.
I will say as someone who uses a NVIDIA card gaming through proton works flawlessly. Certain apps may have bugs. I’m having this one issue where H.265 videos don’t play properly in VLC or MPV.
I saw a meme about sound cards recently and thousands of likes on social media.
And I wonder if it’s people up voting because they remember that era, if it’s bots, or if it’s just people who kinda get the joke and don’t want to be left out?
most likely the last one. especially in computer science, there’s always a lot of people who sorta understand and just want to be included. that’s why most computer science memes are “JavaScript bad” or “python slow” or other super basic mass opinions. I feel like it’s super rare I see an actually original computer science meme
I used Ubuntu for many years on an nvidia machine and had a shit ton of nvidia problems, but I haven’t used Ubuntu for a long time now so I would hope there’s been progress. The experience has made me a lifelong AMD user since though.
Same, I’m on OpenSUSE, nVidia hosts its own OpenSUSE repo. As far back as 8 years(for me) you add the repo and add the driver. Everything works.
Saaame. There was a while there where Wayland didn’t work on the repo version so I had to go full manual, but otherwise it’s been almost perfect now, Wayland and all.
Fedora here and same. It’s just a few commands to get started and everything else works fine
I’ve never had trouble installing them. Getting them to work after an update is another story.
Lolz
