Please explain.
Why are the drivers shitty if they are doing an amazing job protecting? Not sure from what though?
Protecting windows users from the year of the linux desktop?
The drivers being shitty on linux is protecting windows from mass abandonment
Protecting microsoft from the year of the linux desktop is the intended meaning.
Its been such a ballache getting games developed on Unity to run on my 3080 on Mint. I hate having to dual boot into windows to play them but most of the time that’s the only realistic option I’m left with.
I had issue with Nvidia and also with a Realtek PCIe RTL8125, windows work like a charm with the same configuration. Even if I preefer Linux I had to move back for stability.
Maybe Microslop is secretly paying Nvidia to be shit specifically on Linux?
Doesn’t even have to pay. With the way Microsoft pushes AI, Nvidia gets their share automatically.
Lol no, there are far too many problems still with linux. I recently did a dual boot setup to run arch and windows 11 on the same machine, and was saddened to learn that the process would be just as horrible and impenetrable for your average user as it was literally like 15 years ago. It’s just one example, but linux on non linux certified hardware is still far too often running into some kind of issue.
I recently installed windows 11. I needed to search the internet for fixing the update system, use cmd and copying lines of code that i don’t understand.
What the hell is “linux certified” hardware? Why would an average user install arch? Is this a troll post? Are you a real person?
Why would average user install Arch?
Modern user-friendly distros allow a simple graphical install from liveUSB and manage everything, including GRUB configuration, for you. You just select drive, click “install”, reboot and see both Linux and Windows available.
And then Windows yoinks your bootloader back and your Linux boot option poofs…
More of a Windows issue than anything, but still annoying af.
It is annoying. You can avoid by installing Linux on a different hard drive. Obviously not always an optiion but maybe.
Ideally, you should install Linux on a separate physical drive, then this never happens.
But yes, not applicable for everyone. In any case, this can be trivially fixed if you went through this once before.
I had it on a separate drive and this happened to me some how. Perhaps it was my own fuck up, it was a while ago.
Just resulted in me nuking Windows anyhow, and it’s been fine ever since 🤷♀️
Maybe the BIOS/UEFI prioritized wrong drive? Or something fine wrong with GRUB.
Anyhow, congrats on ditching this shithole altogether!
“I installed the distro known for being a bitch to install and it was a bitch to install”
In other news, water is wet!
Dude Arch Linux is not particularly for beginners. Try Linux Mint, it’s slogan is literally “It just works” and is designed with this tenet in mind.
Thats like the best rant ever. Installing the most “sketchy” distro and blaming linux. Lol.
I have an Intel B580 doing game streaming. My past experiences with NVIDIA prepared me for this. This is nothing.
My Nvidia driver has worked flawlessly in Fedora for the past 3 years. Not a single issue.
Had nvidia spectacularly fail on Fedora
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.
I’ve tried 6 different distros on my pc with nvidia graphics and none of them worked the way they shoudl have.
Lmao this is absolutely false, and the fact that you think this means you’re either hilariously misinformed, actively sticking your head in the sand, or outright lying.
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.
if there are working drivers that don’t have issues
There aren’t. Some distros come with Nouveau alone, which is often awfully slow or lags behind in support for new cards. Some by now ship with nouveau + NVK, which is still unsuitable for demanding tasks and has bugs as NVK is still beta. And some ship with the proprietary Nvidia driver which is a hot mess. Changing something about this usually ends up in a mess due to how the Nvidia driver has to install itself into the system every time an update runs, and the fact you have to basically rip out a kernel module for it (nouveau).
mate one issue is the one installed by default on many distros is wrong, the idea that the average person is going to be able to run horrible commands to rip the kernel drivers back out again and force install a version that isn’t the one recommended by the repo (which is what I had to do to get mine working) is simply ridiculous. THAT is not a user’s fault.
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.
Been there! Got that update borked as well, journalctl shows permission errors on /dev/nvidia*
Snapper’ed back as well, waiting for a proper update - bug already reported by others. Freezing driver update was actually problematic because it causes all sorts of dependency issues that end up hard to resolve. Nvidia made a real mess there.
I mean, Nvidia drivers have been shitty on windows too as of late
Am I the only one who has no problems with Nvidia drivers?
But performance according to benchmarks is much worse than on windows.
In AMD case it is higher on Linux if you exclude RT
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.
Imo back in the days amd wasn’t any better
It was actually worse until they open sourced their drivers.
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.)
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
As a nix os user, I would recommend it if you are actually willing to learn the config language. It will be hard. And 2 months into actually making nix os my main machine, I still have no intuition with how to edit the config more than “copy paste this file, add the new code, import”.
Is it worth it? Ehh… I just like how I can actually know what’s installed and not forget a 30 GB app I never use is still there
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.
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…
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.
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
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.
No, they work just fine for me on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. They load and compile in updates and that’s all there is.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I’ve got a really old one, a 1060 or 1070 I forgot. Zero issues
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.
No.
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.
It’s fucking hilarious that this has been going on since I started playing with Linux in the mid 00s.
Upgraded to an AMD card and suddenly Linux became perfectly reliable.
Still has an issue with HDMI speed since HDMI is a proprietary spec and they don’t allow 2.1 in open source drivers so it’s stuck on 2.0 speed. Displayport is very good though.
Same. Hopefully AMD still bothers making GPU with…is it 1% market share while Intel gave up entirely again? Dire.
I had a 3060 and it wasn’t that Linux wasn’t reliable but it occasionally would receive an update that would require a video card driver update as well. I bought a 9070xt, sold the 3060, and haven’t had a single issue since.
Yeah, the nVidia shituation is much better than a decade+ ago, nowdays I just have to manually pause upgrades (of drivers, kernel, or both) for a few weeks once evey two years or so.
I need to buy me some AMD. And AMD/Intel needs to build some high end GPU (for consumers I mean).
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
















