Never had an issue with my Nvidia card. OBS can use the hardware encoder out of the box. Just a few weeks ago upgraded to a AMD card and had to set some “advanced” settings in OBS to do the same. Really happy overall, but after seeing this meme for years I expected rainbows and sunshine but was unpleasantly surprised in that regard.
That’s the thing with AMD drivers, they’re the damn near perfect software. Doing lots of stuff yet you’d never know it’s there. It stays nicely out of the user’s way, you don’t even have to think about installing them and shit just works
Then there are the Nvidia drivers
On one hand, setting up complicated stuff is a challenge and also fun.
On the other hand, I don’t wanna pay a company doing propreitery stuff.
On the other feet, prices are increasing due to chatbot girlfriend arms race between richest dudes on earth; are GPUs really even worth it anymore?
I think it’s more of a
Open drivers vs proprietary drivers
Intel drivers:
I need an intel driver to turn the fucking useless onboard graphics off. for debian. any tips?
In LMDE4, 5 and 6, I pretty much had to install the OEM NVIDIA driver because the open source Nouveau driver didn’t quite cut it, but for AMD, the stock driver that comes with LMDE7 has worked fine for my purposes so far.
I may change my tune if I try to run a more modern game*, but that will likely put me back in Frankendebian territory which caused me problems under LMDE6. (As you might surmise, I upgraded to new hardware and tried to do things as I’d always done them when LMDE6 was current.)
* Minecraft notwithstanding, because it both is and isn’t modern. That can get above 1000 FPS if I don’t limit it.
15 years ago this was true lol
Eh. I had issues with Nvidia drivers like 5 years ago. Still, a lot more stable today
The fps gap in games is still quite high with nvidia compared to windows, amd is almost on par now
3 years ago this was true. Not sure if nvidia works properly with wayland even now, though at least the trend is different now
It has no issues, NVIDIA just works these days (if you use a distro where you can choose to use proprietary drivers for it during installation)
Are there distros where you can’t do that? I mean, maybe Debian?
I have had only a few issues with nVidia on Linux for a few years. But, I am using an old card. I’d like to live in the nice sunny castle, not the scary one with bad weather. But, at least I have mostly working shelter while I play my games.
I think there are some that only install FOSS during initial installation
Like which ones?
I mean yeah, but that’s a little like saying “computers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.” It’s a pretty large limitation to place on the user’s choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.
It used to be that there was no option at all, on any distro. You’d have the broken proprietary drivers, or the open source reverse engineered one with half the performance and unreliability in specialty features.
Since then Nvidia has shifted focus to get their drivers working properly, and there were also changes making them more open source, tho I’m not sure that’d mean the “proprietary driver” will go full foss at some point.
If op is to be believed, the proprietsry driver is already a lot more stable, so it’s now a software licensing issue not an unfixable technical issue.
Exactly!
Well, no, not at all. Nvida works on wayland on any distro, but it just works on some distros.
It just works means no user config required.
You might not remember ATI atrocity.
A decade ago it used to be opposite. How far Nvidia has fallen.
Considering their stock price has grown by 27,557% in those 10 years, I don’t think too many people at the company are concerned with their “falling”
https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/NVDA/performance/total-return
It sucks that they abandoned us, and it’s awful that they’re a huge part of the AI bubble,. But, this is like an artist who used to play on Tuesday evenings at your local live music venues “selling out” and now playing stadiums.
I recall having fairly trouble free run with GF 1060 on Fedora on a desktop.
However having an AMD cpu and nvidia dgpu in a laptop is a fuckin’ nightmare. Probably only Broadcom and Mediatek are more random when it comes to drivers. Good thing is that you can plop out a wifi card and get an Intel one for €20.
Edit: I also run Amd 6800 and 9070 in 2 desktops and that just work. I never had to care for drivers.
Unless if you have the random HP laptop where no Intel card works.
(I have this laptop, there’s 2 ax200s that HP ships, one with Intel one with amd. No it’s not CNVIO)
I had that on some lenovo many many years ago… also lovely.
Luckily an EliteBook I got maybe 2 years ago allowed me to fix a bug in a wifi driver that mediatek introduced. There were workarounds, but fuck that. Ax200 fixed it.
Intel be like that skeleton at the bottom underwater
nvidia drivers are all dependant on who is implementing them
I only ever have problems if the kernel is updated without the drivers, because I somehow updated before the video driver was included
this is my experience for over 10 years now on Arch
For those cases I love endeavourOS, as it configures exactly these (in my opinion PITA) cases automatically “correctly”
I just use the dkms driver package
Yeah, have it setup in nix to just work and haven’t had issues in years. When I ran arch (btw) I was routinely recovering my system from bad updates
this has not been my experience with AMD drivers…
I didn’t really have any issues in Fedora. I enabled the NPM repo in the settings then installed them. Easier than on Windows.
PopOS has been running great for months on my 3070, but I’m about to swap it for a 5060TI and I’m a bit worried.
Nothing to worry about 😇 drivers that work great with 3070 will work great with a 5060
And then you try a libre distro and realize you still need firmware with amd lol.
