Is Nvidia on Linux still bad?

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atrawog@reddit

Use the Bazzite Nvidia Image and enable Supergfxctl.

You can do the same with any other Distro. But Bazzite has the best out of box support for Nvidia in my personal opinion.

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Its all so experimental. It really works so superficially. In my case Supwrgfxctl doesnt even work. Sure it can replace armoury crate in the sense that it can somwhat control the fan and the color of the keyboard light. Thats it. In the sense that nvidia card doesnt ever work since there is no software that could ever make this hardware work in association with nvidia correctly without just asking to kill itself. Why? Caus nvidia runs like garbage even while having all these specific tools to run, that wake her up, shake her up, only to make the entire system (software, fps running) dependent on it, when forcing it to become aware of it, even though from the three graphic cards nvidia runs the worst at running anything when employed. And thats with all linux/nvidia tools and drivers installed over and over. Ive ever seen linux actually work with nvidia and result in less than mediocre. Its just amazing how much a disparity it is in normal linux distros and distros versions that attempt miserably to include nvidia funtionality

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cacheflood@reddit

I gave up... Bought Radeon.

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looper210@reddit

Don't you need Nvidia for Blender and/or AI stuff (in Linux)?

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japanese_temmie@reddit

nvidia on X11 is generally decent

nvidia on wayland on the other hand.. not so much

Although recent drivers have gotten better support.

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metux-its@reddit

on X11 is generally decent

Because we xorg devs didn't change much on the module abi over long time. But with current master branch we had several changes. And now we have to clean after them and add extra workarounds just for Nvidia.

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BulletDust@reddit

Nvidia under Wayland here, no deal breaker issues to speak of.

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NetusMaximus@reddit

I just launch games with the dedicated GPU option while having it set to on-demand mode with Mint.

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Szer1410@reddit (OP)

I was asking if Nvidia on Linux is still bad. Because I’m not sure if I should get an amd laptop or nvidia

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Phoenix591@reddit

it's never been bad in my personal experience (on and off since the mid 2000s on desktops )

their driver was closed source, but their binary drivers worked well. Now their driver is open source with more stuff shoved into their binary firmware similar to other GPU drivers ( but still not part of the main kernel )

They were slow to get on board with Wayland the way everyone else was using it, but they finally got on board so that it's pretty much fine there afaik.

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metux-its@reddit

Only the kernel part is open (for new gpus), the userland stuff isn't. Otherwise we could have fixed it long ago.

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cloggedsink941@reddit

I think optimus stuff was not supported. So that was actively bad. The rest yeah always worked fine with proprietary drivers.

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blacksmith_de@reddit

AMD's iGPUs are a lot better than Intels, so you might want to have a look at some benchmarks first to see if you really need a dGPU

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Wooden-Engineer-8098@reddit

Of course you should get amd laptop. It will be faster, cheaper and better supported

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NetusMaximus@reddit

I have no position then because I dont know what you mean by bad, my laptop has both a AMD and Nvidia I can switch between.

Dont have a problem with it if I make sure to select "use dedicated"

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0ViraLata@reddit

Maybe he is talking about driver support and stuff like that. Since nvidia is proprietary and always gave linux the middle finger.

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Big-Afternoon-3422@reddit

Except they don't really do anymore and have a very decent driver support now imo

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Kevin_Kofler@reddit

The driver is still a proprietary blob, so nothing has really changed for the end user.

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Big-Afternoon-3422@reddit

They also have open source drivers.

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Kevin_Kofler@reddit

The same reverse-engineered ones (Nouveau) that have always been there.

Unless you mean the "Nvidia-open" kernel driver that is useless without the proprietary libGL blob in which all the logic lies. (It is not compatible with the Nouveau or NVK userspace drivers.)

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_zenith@reddit

Their upcoming “nova” GPU driver is all-open-source, no?

However, it’s not released yet, and won’t be for some time yet, so it is of course reasonable to say that they do not currently offer any open source driver.

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Kevin_Kofler@reddit

Nova does not come from Nvidia, it is an attempt by some Nouveau developers to rewrite Nouveau in Rust.

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_zenith@reddit

I shouldn’t have said “their”, true, it just has some full-time employees that are working on it

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Big-Afternoon-3422@reddit

Didn't the guy from nouveau get hired by Nvidia to work on it ?

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0ViraLata@reddit

I quite late on the news, that was just a guess. But are they still proprietary? Because yes, they might work with Linux, my laptop has a nvidia dedicated graphica card and works fine. But the fact I have proprietary code running in otherwise free and open source system, bothers me a little, ngl.

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FunkybunchesOO@reddit

It doesn't work properly with gnome. The windows/terminals are not visible in a remote desktop session for some reason.

It's only the Nvidia drivers. Went back to the generic ones and it works fine.

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Placidpong@reddit

I’m not super knowledgeable, but I’m having little to no problems on my 3050 using fedora 41

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jr735@reddit

Why would you take the risk?

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realquakerua@reddit

It is still proprietary closed source driver.

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cloggedsink941@reddit

Laptop with intel cpu and intel graphics is probably the most hassle free experience on linux.

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mechanical-monkey@reddit

I've got an Nvidia laptop on MINT. Works greatm fedora was also a great experience. I always end up back on mint though

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FailRough1887@reddit

I have a question, Im super beginner in terms of all this and Im taking cs as my major. I was planning on buying a laptop which works well for coding, programming and video editing. But for good video editing and rendering I have heard nvidia gpu are great. And now I have heard linux is good for learning coding and programming. So what should I do? Im really confused..

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LvS@reddit

As someone who's recently been at the bleeding edge of GPU stuff working on the GTK Vulkan renderer, there is one big difference between AMD/Intel and nvidia:

nvidia is not part of the community.

Why is that relevant? Because it means we cannot synchronize what we do with nvidia. With AMD/Intel we communicate about important issues and get them worked on in time for the next releases, so that when a new Fedora or Ubuntu gets released, we know that the driver version works well with GTK. Here's some examples:

nvidia's Vulkan driver wakes up the dGPU every time a Vulkan-using app starts. This takes 3-5 seconds. So every GTK app on a dual-gpu nvidia laptop currrently takes 5s to start.
The nvidia 3xx/4xx drivers have a critical bug. The drivers are unsupported by nvidia, so the bug will never be fixed. That means older nvidia GPUs (> 10 years old) will not work with Gnome starting next release. Way older AMD/Intel GPUs still work fine (I think it's 15-20 years).
Nvidia only supports explicit synchronization of data, while the rests of Linux in the past has done implict synchronization. While Wayland compositors do support explicit sync now (that's why people say "Wayland works now"), many applications working with GPUs do not. GStreamer for example has an open bug about it with issues integrating things, so now there's tearing/flickering with hardware decoded video only on nvidia. Things like this, where only nvidia is different and not supported and no progress is made, is quite common.

So does it work today? Maybe, maybe not.
Will it work next release? Maybe, maybe not.
Nobody really knows because nvidia and the community don't talk so nobody knows what new features the community will ship and if nvidia will support that feature on the GPU you buy.

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mrlinkwii@reddit

The drivers are unsupported by nvidia, so the bug will never be fixed. That means older nvidia GPUs (> 10 years old) will not work with Gnome starting next release.

tbh i see this as a non issue , because after about 10 years you should be upgrading ,

15-20 year old gpus are ewaste at this point

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Sync1211@reddit

I'm still rocking a GT 630M on my laptop and it works just fine.

Why would I need to upgrade if everything works just fine?

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mrlinkwii@reddit

Why would I need to upgrade if everything works just fine?

berdin of maintenance and the fact not al maintainer have said hardware

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Sync1211@reddit

As long as it works and doesn't have any critical security issues, why would I need to upgrade?

Even if my laptop stopped getting driver updates tomorrow it would still be usable and get updates for everything else.

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mrlinkwii@reddit

As long as it works and doesn't have any critical security issues, why would I need to upgrade?

if you wish not to upgrade software sure , but their is a point the maintenance burden is too much and not worth it to have in a codebase and another thing depending on said hardware the said maintainers may not have the hardware and a good number of people dont want to keep whats essentially e-waste

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Sync1211@reddit

I'm not saying that they have to support my hardware, just that after more than 10 years it's still very much usable.

However, I distinctly remember that when I tried Linux on it 4 years after buying it, I already had issues with the Nvidia drivers.

So the hatred for Nvidia is grounded in that we don't get good drivers even for brand new hardware.

Of course I did occasionally have bad drivers on Windows as well, but not as much as on Linux.

Running Mint on my RTX 3090Ti still results in stuttering issues, even when idle.

(Same card works great on Windows)

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MidnighT0k3r@reddit

I'm still rocking a gt 260m from 2009. Still works for my needs. Why upgrade that which doesn't need to be and create e-waste faster than necessary?

I simply disagree with your statement.

Nothing is e-waste until it stops working and isn't repairable. Nothing. When I do get rid of the laptop I'll be keeping the screen for a Raspberry Pi monitor.

r/vintagecomputing r/retrobattlestations

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Wooden-Engineer-8098@reddit

Old hardware uses much more electricity for same workload. So it wastes electricity

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MidnighT0k3r@reddit

I see your valid point. However, it's still just a laptop. They've used 65w bricks for well over a decade. (Though the one I am using does use a bigger supply, what I'm going to explain still makes sense)

In some aspects it's not that they use less power, it's that they do more with it.

If you run an old system full bore and a new system full bore and both use 65w... you won't see any significant difference in power month to month at all.

What you will see is the newer system is accomplishing more.

Here's the thing though, I don't need to accomplish more. How much hardware it takes to do what I'm doing well, even the old hardware exceeds it.

So in my use case, there would literally be ZERO tangible benefits to replacing the system.

In addition to that, the power under load vs new, negligible and the point to break even well... when its $0.12/kw and I'm not even using 65w... will take such a long time it's also a moot point.

65watts for a month is only about $5.

So, no. It doesn't waste electricity. If you do see that as waste then you should be unplugging all of the phantom power devices in your house when not in use.

If you are looking at it as a wide geographical area then yes, replacing ALL of them would save power but how many people do you really think are running 15-year-old hardware. It's not that many.

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Virtualization_Freak@reddit

And yet they still see use. I'm still rocking gt 210s in applications because they are cheap, abundant, and have been solid.

If the workload doesn't change, there's no point in changing the hardware.

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NathanialJD@reddit

so essentially this comes down to nvidia refusing to work well with others. same reason they dont work on mac os anymore. theyre pretty notorious for keeping to themselves, i kinda wish they would just stop working on gaming gpus and focus their efforts on the workstation/ai that they obviously favour. Leave AMD/Intel to work for consumers

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ModeEnvironmentalNod@reddit

This needs to be pinned at the top of the sub.

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mystictroll@reddit

F NVIDIA

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HeshamSHY@reddit

the other way around,

Nvidia, F you

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djbashtan@reddit

My RTX 3080 Ti works flawless on my PC with Intel 9 12900K + LG Ultragear 32" 4k Monitor. I've played all my games without any issues and everything works just perfect. I have only 16 days on Linux and I've already deleted all microsoft related from my PC. For any usual "normal" user, Linux Mint 22 is excellent for gaming and daily working/activities on a PC. And for sure if you need some "professional" tools like DaVinci or Photoshop shit you always can keep the fukin windows on another ssd. I don't! :-)

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mimedm@reddit

I recently installed pop_os and was impressed how convenient it was and how well gaming worked.

I also heard good things about endeavor

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Szer1410@reddit (OP)

Does popos or endeavor support plasma 6?

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mimedm@reddit

I don't know but I think so. They come with several flavors iirc

I liked the default one with the pop os store. The store is not a well programmed app but it's was really easy to customize the menu and setup gamehub, steam and gog

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Lamda-f90@reddit

Just buy a Lenovo

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cr77fr@reddit

Nvidia open works great in Arch with a Nvidia 3070 Ti. But seems this is not so fluent with some others cards.

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Karls0@reddit

But GPU for what? For gaming or for professional work? I cannot say about the first purpose, as I don't use Linux for gaming currently. But for heavy calculations on GPU Nvidia is not bad, opposite, it is still far above AMD. Radeons have ROCm, but it still lacks correct support in many professional tools, making it far less resource efficient than CUDA. In this case you may hate Nvidia for not being so open. But it doesn't matter if you don't want to compromise raw performance.

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archmage-sully@reddit

I'm an Nvidia user, and if I had to explain the sich in one word, it's:

Marginally

Expect a few issues

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Next_Information_933@reddit

It’s not horrible but reliably switching and not having weird issues will require rebooting

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retention_king@reddit

Dunno why it should be bad, working as a software engineer, specifically data engineering, data science and AI/ML stuff. Got a nvidia gpu and dont have any problems, works like a charm.

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Dull_Cucumber_3908@reddit

nvidia in linux works as expected. And all this "nvidia doesn't work" thing is just BS

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Gbitd@reddit

Manjaro SUCKS

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Far_Departure_1580@reddit

True

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Far_Departure_1580@reddit

True

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HeshamSHY@reddit

As a person who owns a laptop with Linux and Nvidia GPU, steer away from it.

You either use the open source drivers, which are not good, to say the least, when it comes to gaming.

Or you can switch to the proprietary drivers, and pray to god you don't throw that laptop out the window accidentally when trouble shooting. It starts with secure boot, you have to make an MOK and enroll that into the bios, then sign the modules. If you want wayland, then starp yourself in for the rid- oops, the kernel got updated, and now the drivers don't work.

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1337epicgamer1337@reddit

not a single kernel upgrade has caused me to break nvidia drivers, and I run upstream.

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HeshamSHY@reddit

well, for me at least, it did. And I'm not saying it must happen, I'm saying it could happen.

It highly depends on the distro you use and the source you installed the drivers from. For example, right now, in debian testing/sid it's not working with the latest kernel, I had to add a repo archive to the sources list and install an older kernel for it to work.

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1337epicgamer1337@reddit

fair enough! in the end it's the personal experiences that matter, and for me nvidia has been okay. I hope it does get better for you

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mrvictorywin@reddit

Disable secure boot in firmware, you don't need it unless you use Win11 and play Valorant / LoL / TFT.

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_Sgt-Pepper_@reddit

Just use pop-os and be done with it. Works great with Nvidia

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Szer1410@reddit (OP)

Okay thanks. Is kde plasma 6 available on popos? And how about manjaro? Is it good with nvidia?

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codingjungle@reddit

i have 3 laptops, one with a nvidia rtx 3050ti, another with a ryzen 7 apu (4th generation) and one with a 10th generation intel iGPU. performance wise, the laptop with the nvidia gpu runs the best, but setup can be a bit tricky, especially depending on which distro i install and if using an external monitor.

after years of using nvidia gpu's, if you are okay with using the proprietary driver, you usually will have a "decent" enough experience. the open source nvidia driver is a nightmare, even with older gpu's (it is better on older ones, but that isn't saying much). i've also had issues over the years with the intel and amd laptop, but i don't recall if any of them were related to the gpu, there are other hardware issues that have crept up (looking at you broadcom wireless card).

one of the reasons system76 sell laptops/desktop with nvidia gpu's, is cause pop!_os (their ubuntu based distro), they release a nvidia version of it, that comes with the nvidia proprietary driver preinstalled and a few other tweaks to make run better. so again, if you are okay with using the proprietary drivers, then you will likely be okay with whatever distro you choose (there are distro's that are more fanatical about using proprietary drivers tho than others).

i'm currently running manjaro on my rtx 3050ti laptop. it wasn't "hard" to install the nvidia driver, the problem i ran into was using an external monitor with it over hdmi. i had to install the optimus-manger, and force the use of the nvidia gpu to get the external monitor to work. this is something i didn't have to do with ubuntu or fedora, but it was definitely easier on ubuntu.

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Luigi003@reddit

Not terrible but a worse experience than AMD for sure

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Sensitive-Specific-1@reddit

this laptop has an AMD APU and there seemed to me many like it when I bought it. Why you think there are not many?

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King_Corduroy@reddit

I'm using an older Nvidia GPU on Linux Mint at the moment. I've noticed more screen tearing on videos since switching from AMD but overall it's been pretty flawless for games and I get much better performance.

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trashstarrxo@reddit

older asus rog zephyrus g14 (2022) has ryzen and amd gpu, u can get it used for like $500

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Szer1410@reddit (OP)

But what is the performance?

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trashstarrxo@reddit

look up the performance on youtube

it has rx6700s gpu

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MattyGWS@reddit

I want to have a peak Linux experience

I want to install Manjaro on my laptop

Two things I don't see said together too often

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Dismal-Item-2103@reddit

manjaro is peak linux experience if by linux experience you mean fixing broken shit lmao

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C96Alia@reddit

Don't have much experience with Manjaro, but I did install it onto an early Core 2 laptop. It was surprisingly light, and seemed stable enough.

Not easy to find something that can run on 2006-era hardware well, that's not an ultra-light distro that lacks a bunch of mainstream packages, so I don't see much reason to not give it a thumbs up?

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C96Alia@reddit

Don't have much experience with it, admittedly, but I did install it onto an early Core 2 laptop. It was surprisingly light, and seemed stable enough.

It was nice to have an already packaged mesa-amber to install as well, rather than compiling it myself, to use the old DRI GMA 95x drivers. A couple other distros had them as well, but none of them would have been as nice on that old a CPU, or would have taken ages to compile (plain arch).

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Ingaz@reddit

Zero problems for 5 years. But I'm on Intel iGPU

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PBJellyChickenTunaSW@reddit

Manjaro still lving off about 4 months of good press a couple years ago

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starlevel01@reddit

couple of years? try ten years ago

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chic_luke@reddit

It does take me back though. Manjaro was one of the first distros I had used. I was not aware it was still around

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StayRich8006@reddit

I tried it recently and didn't like it for stability reasons in case anyone wondered

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Admirable-Treat-7516@reddit

I installed and the wiki told me to roll back the date as a solution for expired certificates. Moved to arch asap. Then arch broke for me and I debloated Ubuntu.

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StayRich8006@reddit

Oh my, that's not what I experienced but sounds even worse

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chic_luke@reddit

Some things truly never change, huh?

I remember not having a good time with stability either, assumed it needed more time in the oven

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loozerr@reddit

It needs to be chucked into a furnace and forgotten about, oven doesn't cut it.

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yarbelk@reddit

I keep meaning to take it of my laptop, but I just don't use my laptop much

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PraetorRU@reddit

Yeah. Manjaro zealots with daily raids into Ubuntu's subreddit was amusing to see a few years ago.

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SecretTraining4082@reddit

At this point I think it was 4 or 5 years ago. I remember trying out Linux during the pandemic and people were gushing about how good Manjaro was.

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DuendeInexistente@reddit

What's the issue with manjaro? It's been a good experience so far. Only aspect I disliked is the installer is kind of trash.

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Mister08@reddit

Manjaro maintains its own repositories, separate from Arch’s, which can lead to dependency issues when software expects newer libraries that haven’t been updated yet. This also causes problems for AUR packages, since they rely on Arch’s repositories but may end up pulling outdated Manjaro versions instead. Additionally, Manjaro uses its own kernel instead of Arch’s, which has led to stability issues due to inconsistent updates and driver conflicts.

Manjaro has also had multiple cases where a normal system update (-Syu) wasn’t enough and required special steps, such as manually updating specific packages first or reinstalling components like GRUB-- but there's no way for a user to know that without preemptively searching for the patch notes; which runs counter to the "user-friendliness" Manjaro markets as a primary benefit of their OS.

I think you can successfully run a stable Manjaro system, but I think the amount of work required to do so makes it pretty indistinguishable from just running a regular Arch install, or something like EndeavourOS.

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jaaval@reddit

I have ran both arch and manjaro and the amount of problems I have had with arch is several times higher. So the idea that you are going to get more stable experience with arch is at least in my experience just not true.

I haven’t actually had a single issue with manjaro packages being incompatible. I have never even had aur package break even though that is a possibility. My fairly untechnical wife used the manjaro machine for a long time and the biggest thing I had to fix was some keychain update problem.

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Mister08@reddit

I'm happy Manjaro has worked fine for you, and if you like it I'm in no way trying to convince you to abandon your current setup. However I'd like to point out that anecdotal success doesn’t erase consistent, documented issues. Manjaro has a history of update failures that require manual intervention—systemd & pacman breakages Mar 2024:, GRUB update issues Dec 2023, and Nvidia driver mismatches due to repo delays Jun 2023:. These sorts of things aren’t rare, isolated cases; they’re systemic issues caused by how Manjaro handles updates and packages.

I'm not trying to say running Arch/EOS/Catchy/whatever is guaranteed to be an easy, bug-free experience. I myself screwed up just a few months ago after updating. I didn't bother checking for issues prior to the update, and got caught in the crossfire of a kernel update Nvidia drivers, and Wayland. However, if I'm having to check things over to avoid breakage on Manjaro, what's the point of avoiding base Arch or "pure" derivatives? What is it I gain by using Manjaro other than another update pipeline that seems just as likely to cause issues as avoid them?

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BrodatyBear@reddit

Same, except for few AUR packages (but well... they are not official, problems are to be expected).

I wouldn't recommend it to newcomers (like it was popular some time ago before SteamOS was released (now "everyone" switched to it)), but it was not as bad as people are describing here.

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lord_pizzabird@reddit

Yeah. Still mind blowing that people don't at this point know about Fedora.

That's what they want / need. The end.

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FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit

Nooo. Rpm’s and no AUR. At least for ARM64, AUR is very important.

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FabioSB@reddit

I entered Linux thanks to manjaro with nvidia. I had an excellent experience. I don't know what are you talking about... Maybe AUR? Random users code execution? In my case I moved away from slow package manager and because I like learning to port software myself (I like the port/portage/BSD filosophy), but for new users arch or any Arch based system is a great experience.

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C0rn3j@reddit

Manjaro is an incompetent for-profit, you are infinitely better grabbing Arch Linux which has an install TUI script nowadays (archinstall).

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jcelerier@reddit

Nowadays I'd recommend cachyOS, it's Arch-lile but with packages optimized for recent CPU architectures and kernel tuned for interactive experience

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C0rn3j@reddit

It would make much more sense to push for such changes upstream rather than installing a random derivative, if they make sense to be upstreamed.

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jcelerier@reddit

I mean, the push for such changes upstream has existed for like, more than a decade at this point. Like, I could find in 5 s of googling a 2011 154-pages thread about optimized packages: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=111715

It's very fair to assume that if this hasn't happened in 14 years, it isn't going to happen tomorrow either even though there's work on it upstream.

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ReveredOxygen@reddit

I installed arch, but have the cachy repos enabled. The one thing you have to watch out for is that cachy packages are often rather out of date compared to the normal arch ones

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m3rcuu@reddit

I don't know man. I'm with manjaro for over 10 years with no serious problems. Two years ago I tried "archinstall" on a new laptop and it failed to boot.

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redrider65@reddit

Funny, despite the wise disdain Manjaro always gets on reddit by non-Manjaro users, actual users of Manjaro usually report positive experience.

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Manuel_Cam@reddit

Manjaro has a reputation of devs messing up and generally being Arch but worse

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R3D_T1G3R@reddit

Facts

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witchhunter0@reddit

I've used it too. But there are some stuff to be concerned of. There were some clumsy initiatives like the one to introduce telemetry. Second their ARM release is not maintained anymore. So it has been steadily declining.

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jaaval@reddit

I’ve had manjaro in one laptop for multiple years and it’s been fine. Much less problems than what I have had with arch or gentoo and everything worked out of the box.

The couple of mistakes the developers did haven’t really affected user experience in my case.

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Ingaz@reddit

I'm using Manjaro with zero problems. For 5 years maybe on several laptops and ARM version on Raspberry Pi

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killersteak@reddit

Manjaro is fine enough, but be prepared to install a bunch of stuff to their spins that they neglected, like bluetooth file sharing stuff in KDE.

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Byte_Code@reddit

Use EndeavourOS! It's all the benefits of Arch with none of the drawbacks. I switched from Manjaro a couple years ago and not looking back.

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hitosama@reddit

Speaking of. How do you install stuff that's not available in AUR (if that's what it's called) on Arch-based distros like EndeavourOS? There has been few cases I've only had RPM/YUM and DEB/APT available and even some cases with only RPM available.

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Seltox@reddit

Another option is just install it in a distrobox. Eg create one from Fedora or Debian.

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andrco@reddit

Usually it's easiest to compile it from source and install it with make. If you insist on using the deb/rpm then you can extract it and figure out where the files need to go and what the runtime dependencies are. It's also quite possible it won't work due to shared libraries being different versions.

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Beast_Viper_007@reddit

Use CachyOS for newer hardware.

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ExPandaa@reddit

Honestly prefer cachyos at this point, especially for a gaming machine.

But yes, EndeavourOS is peak

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RampantAndroid@reddit

I’ll pile on to recommend EOS over Manjaro. You get everything good about Arch without taking on any issues that come with Manjaro. You get an AUR helped reinstalled, a nice installer and themes that look fine.

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suchtie@reddit

Agreed, it's nice. I get the same freedoms I'd have on pure Arch, with less hassle. Outside of my various DE/wm setups I need to do very little customization, it's mostly good enough out of the box for me.

Basically the only thing I gotta do is clear my pacman cache once in a while... which, I know, I could make a cron job for. But I'm lazy, which for me is the entire point of using EndeavourOS. I'm ok with doing it manually when the partition gets full, every couple months or so. (It's a very small root partition at only 30GB. I've been meaning to make it bigger but, lazy.)

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sargeanthost@reddit

you can just enable the paccacje service

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TONKAHANAH@reddit

i'll never understand this subs hate for manjaro. I used it for years and had a good experience.

these days I do think that with the archinstaller being as good as it is, manjaro simply isnt needed any more, but that doesnt change my opinion about the distro being perfectly fine and usable, its certainly a better experience than a lot of other distros I've used.

[-]

Equal_Prune963@reddit

They just have a terrible track record on every level. From accidentally DDoSing the AUR, to letting their SSL certificates expire at least three times and asking users to reset their clocks. Also the whole drama surrounding their finances after the project leader tried to buy a €2000 laptop with donations and then clashed with the treasurer, which eventually forced him to resign.

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TONKAHANAH@reddit

I'm sure we racked up the fuck up from every os maintainer we'd probably have similar shit to talk about.

Just seems silly to care about that shit when at the end of the day, the os works fine. Running it as a daily driver I never had any issues.

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ShitC0der@reddit

It’s gotten better. Always had issues in the past, breaking my system or giving me only an hour of battery life. Installed it recently on my Arch system with plasma on wayland, all I did was install the nvidia package, and it worked fine. Power consumption is even a lot better now, getting almost the full 4-5 hours I would with the card off, doing work not gaming. At least that was my experience recently.

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TadeoTrek@reddit

For the last few years Ubuntu includes a check on the GPU on the installer and if it detects an Nvidia GPU (and you allow it) it auto-install the latest proprietary Nvidia drivers, it doesn't get better than that.

As for performance, these days is on par or sometimes better (because there's less overhead) than on Windows. I switched to Linux back in 2013 precisely because of the improved performance on my Nvidia GPU (I work in 3D modeling/rendering).

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lordpawsey@reddit

Early January I picked up a ThinkPad P14s which has a discrete graphics card as well as the intel iris xe built in. Installed Fedora as usual.

For a couple of weeks I just went with the intel thinking what a ball ache it was going to be to install the Nvidia drivers.

A few weeks in I had set myself a free afternoon to commit to installing the Nvidia drivers, decided to go the easy option and install through the Hardware Drivers option in Gnome Software and was up and running in 10 minutes or so.

I have had no issues so far... (A month or so in)

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left_unsigned@reddit

How is the battery life?

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lordpawsey@reddit

Not great. Around 4 or 5 hours for general use, half that if it's something more intensive.

[-]

left_unsigned@reddit

Thank you!

[-]

lnxrootxazz@reddit

Yes

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CodeFarmer@reddit

Data point: I have been using a (desktop) RTX3060 on Sparky Linux and now Mint for about a year and a half, and it's honestly gone great.

Bonus: you can also do CUDA on it.

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nonesense_user@reddit

Purchase either pure AMD or Intel, both provide open-source drivers and documentation for more than a decade. You will have full integration within Linux, Mesa and Wayland. And the most important feature, reliability.

Bonus: No issues with display multiplexing.

Nvidia is dominating the discrete market because the because of press coverage for benchmark wins. Their cards are the fastet but not by a huge margin and this is only one feature. The problem of Nvidia is the policy of the company. They did not published documentation and open-source drivers for decades. Decades, not years. Nor supported Mesa nor Wayland well. This creates all kind of issues, sometimes suspend/resume fails, KMS was only added late, upgrades are often not possible due to incompatiblity and finally support on the kernel bugzilla is declined (tainted kernels - with closed source - don't get any support).

In meantime AMD brought us Freesync (VRR). AMD gave us Vulkan! Nvidia only came up with expensive proprietary features like GSYNC (VRR). And only recently started to ship tiny parts of open-source code. I'm afraid it will take years to close the gap to Intel and AMD.

If you need to play with high performance: Desktop + discrete AMD. Saves you some money.

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ModeEnvironmentalNod@reddit

You WILL rip your hair out with the hybrid graphics. I quit using a $3000 laptop entirely over it, and instead use an $800 AMD APU laptop. Now it's a $3000 Nvidia-powered dust collector.

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entropyvsenergy@reddit

I use Pop! OS, which bundles the proprietary Nvidia drivers and haven't had any problems.

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3G6A5W338E@reddit

Go AMD and save yourself the headache.

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erikp121@reddit

My own personal experience with nvidia GPU and GNU/Linux have been smooth, but I haven't owned a nvidia since the 8800 GTS 512 on my own. Back in the days nvidia were the goto GPU manufacturer (and the process of installing proprietary nvidia drivers haven't changed since then).

Install the distro, preferably a base distro and not a fork/derivative, install the proprietary nvidia driver "the distro way" and manually set up the usage of iGPU and dGPU if it is a laptop/CPU with a GPU.

My last experience with a nvidia GPU was/is on a laptop where I disabled the iGPU and only utilized the nvidia GPU with the legacy proprietary driver.

I use amdgpu, btw.

[-]

Zaleru@reddit

If you will use a GPU for AI, NVidia will work, but you should use a good distro. If you want it for gaming, AMD is far better on Linux.

Linux Mint and MX Linux come with an app to troubleshot Nvidia problems.

Manjaro is a rolling release distro. You will have a lot of work with it because of bugs. It is only recommended for advanced users.

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DoUKnowMyNamePlz@reddit

It's getting better but still not as good as amd.

[-]

Wooden-Engineer-8098@reddit

You don't need dedicated GPU, it's novideo propaganda. Buy recent amd cpu with built-in gpu, it'll be faster, cheaper and better supported than novideo

[-]

lilv447@reddit

Ive been running fedora for a few weeks now with a 3080ti. My experience is it depends what youre doing. I'm dual booting with windows so all of my gaming is getting done on windows. My experience with gaming on Linux with an Nvidia gpu was that, at least out of the box, the experience wasn't the best. Had issues with the shown fps count not matching what I was clearly seeing with my eyeballs (in fairness to fedora, that actually happened when I was running Kubuntu).

Right now I've tried running the proprietary drivers on X11, and (currently) running the open source drivers on Wayland, using hyprland. And truthfully I have not noticed any gpu driver or gpu specific issues, I had some trouble getting swww to properly apply wallpapers to my vertical monitor but I don't think that had anything to do with the gpu. Nvidia support on Linux has certainly come a long way.

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joedotphp@reddit

I wouldn't say it's bad but it's certainly not great. I use it everyday with minimal issues.

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angrynibba69@reddit

I am being dead ass when I say you should be more concerned about running Manjaro at all than your Nvidia compatibility. For reference, I daily drive a 4090 on Debian Sid and it runs beautifully

[-]

CheesyMcBreazy@reddit

The desktop is still way smoother on AMD. With my old NVIDIA card (GTX 1650) and the latest drivers and such everything on the desktop was slightly stuttery and it felt like the desktop environment was dropping frames or something. When I switched to AMD (RX 6600) everything become ridiculously smooth, at least compared to my NVIDIA card. This was my experience with KDE across multiple different distros. GNOME had the same problems but to a lesser extent, so maybe NVIDIA would be less of a problem there. NVIDIA + KDE was not a enjoyable experience.

[-]

av-f@reddit

I am a linux newbie, so that's why I like Garuda

[-]

Rainmaker0102@reddit

Hi! Running EndeavourOS with an AMD CPU and an RTX 3060, runs very well and sleep & wake issues are minimal

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Misicks0349@reddit

from what I can tell its gotten better, although there are still issues with wayland

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Mds03@reddit

Look, can you even define why you personally think Nvidia is bad on Linux? If not, the issues with Nvidia might not affect your experience at all.

I get that there is a lot of things Nvidia could be doing better, but I've had systems from both vendors and my experience is that more things work well on Nvidia, or in the worst case wont work without it (I think DaVinci Resolve is like this but I'm not sure if it still is). For video editing, 3D and gaming, Nvidia has been excellent for me on Linux really.

Currently I'm using Nobara, which is based of Fedora but is a more finely tuned experience IMO. It makes it easy to install Nvidia drivers, and a lot of other things you might want for gaming or content creation. Very solid choice for both a workstation and a gaming computer IMO.

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_Proud-Suggestion_@reddit

Runs fine for me, there is a bug(random mem leak in kwin wayland) that I am annoyed about but rest is fine.

[-]

richterbg@reddit

I have an old Lenovo Thinkpad T510 laptop with NVIDIA Quadro NVS 3100M video card. Although it is a 15-year machine, it still works fine. However, surprise-surprise, the video card is not supported in the latest versions of Ubuntu.

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rocketstopya@reddit

DX12 gaming can be much slower with Nvidia. Vulkan , DX11 is fine.

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redcaps72@reddit

Ohh, can you explain why? I guess I experienced this in Naraka, DX12 was pretty bad but DX11 was very stable, I thought it was about only this game

[-]

Julian_1_2_3_4_5@reddit

i definitely works, but might need some tweaks... and if you just want the best out of the box experience, i would recomment mint and if you want the best experience after tweaking i recommend arch. But definitely don't use manjaro, it has the drwabavks of arch, but a lot less of the benefits and it being more stable than arch is actually a bad thing, because on arch you need to know your system to hold back package updates and especially if you use the aur the manjaro devs can't know your system

[-]

holyblackcat@reddit

Yes, it's still buggy. No blocking bugs, but some things are annoying. I bought a new laptop made in 2024, and:

Dual integrated+discrete GPUs work out of the box on Arch (if you install the right packages, some of which are not obvious), and Steam even automatically uses the dGPU for games, BUT any time you launch an app using dGPU, there's a chance the second monitor freezes (and you have to disable/reenable it in the display settings to make it unfreeze). And the suggested fix is to always run the dGPU in performance mode, no thanks.

Disabling iGPU in the BIOS fixes that, but makes the battery life worse, and now every time I lock the PC and leave it for half an hour, it gets stuck at a black screen after unlocking, which can only be fixed by restarting the X server, which kills all running apps.

Replacing light-locker with an alternative locker fixed the back screen, and everything seems to work now, but this is too much effort.

[-]

pugsly_@reddit

to put it simply? yes. just not as bad as it used to be

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bje332013@reddit

If I recall correctly, I read that Nvidia would START focusing on developing open source drivers for Linux on its new line of GPUs / graphics chips - not that it would publish open source drivers for current or legacy GPUs / graphic chips. That being said, if you're going to buy a laptop with Nvidia graphics and plan to use Linux, you ought to check whether the graphics chip is among those for which Nvidia said it would develop open source drivers for Linux.

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enderwiggin83@reddit

Nvidia with Linux mint is a better experience than a laptop with any graphics card in my opinion. My laptop has nvidia 3050 mobile with a Radeon RX Vega 6. You can switch between them. They’re honestly both fine. Running AI models on the go does cause the machine to run at about 50 watts compared to 5 watts I get for a non integrated graphics laptop I also have, similar cpu specs.

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b3081a@reddit

Usable to some degree, definitely not preferred choice unless you're running a lot of machine learning workload.

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hangint3n@reddit

I'm on my 4 or 5 Nvidia card. I've never had issues. I've read about ppl saying there are issues, but never had any myself.

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sequential_doom@reddit

I have computers with both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. The only one I've had headaches trying to get to work properly and that has broken after updates is the NVIDIA one.

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Terrible-Hornet4059@reddit

No. I have no issues with it whatsoever.

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LavenderDay3544@reddit

No. I use KDE Plasma on Wayland with my RTX 4090. There have been zero issues since driver version 515, which basically fixed things.

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j0kk0@reddit

After 2 days of trying to set this up I finally gave up. Yeah it's bad

[-]

Opvolger@reddit

I have a work laptop (Dell) with a Intel/Nvidia GPU. Running Fedora (kde spin). All the troubles I had with updates were related to Nvidia. Not waking all the monitors / after pulling in and out and in a HDMI cable, monitor is not detected / refresh rate not correct etc etc. it is all fixed is a couple of days. But at home with an AMD GPU, I had no trouble at all.

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No-Author1580@reddit

I have absolutely zero issues with Nvidia on Ubuntu. Haven't had issues for more than a decade.

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Shady_Hero@reddit

NO

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YeOldePoop@reddit

It's pretty okay now, I have a GTX 1660 SUPER and it was very iffy on Wayland last year but they have made some strides. Reason I make note of the card is because I am unsure about older cards if they are good.

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Kirschi@reddit

Please rather try Garuda than Manjaro - Manjaro broke thrice for me before I'd had enough and changed to an actually stable distro (Garuda) which won't break after every 2nd update

[-]

adsick@reddit

for me it sucked badly - Lenovo Legion 15ACH6H with rtx 3060. Otherwise a pretty good machine, served me for 3 yrs (still operational) but I hate the 80mm fans spinning up so I built a pc.

The external display output is hardwired to the DGPU on this and I believe many other gaming laptops so you have to have it running in order to get any picture. Powering up a dgpu has a fixed wattage margin which I don't like. But that is just half of the problem - the experience sucks even if you ignore the battery life. I get some kind of overhead/stutter when running Wayland (which is basically default and "peak Linux experience") - everything is less smooth than on the integrated graphics which is ridiculous.

The last nail in the coffin is that suspending is broken with nvidia cards. You can't put your machine to sleep and you can't wake it later - only hard restart.

I ended up just disabling nvidia and used it for gaming on windows. AMD igpu had 0 issues.

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justanothercommylovr@reddit

Yes it still sucks

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Kiwithegaylord@reddit

Go with intel or AMD if you have the option. Nvidia has gotten better but you’ll only have a “good” experience if your gpu is a few years old or so

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SongTop8317@reddit

My experience was fine. I have a 2060 and the only problems i had so far were that the drivers are not as intuitive as with geforce experience and minor flickering in the login screen. Nothing in game

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Redditburd@reddit

Do yourself a favor and use Ubuntu

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Distinct_Adeptness7@reddit

Get the proprietary Nvidia drivers and you'll be fine. The nouveau native kernel drivers for Nvidia gpus have never worked well. They are usually blacklisted by default on many distros.

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Kevin_Kofler@reddit

That is exactly why we are recommending against using Nvidia hardware. In my view, using proprietary driver blobs is a no go.

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Distinct_Adeptness7@reddit

For years I had the habit of buying laptops that had broadcom 43xx wifi cards. Not intentionally, it just happened that way because who made the wifi card wasn't my main focus when shopping for a new machine.

The b43xx drivers are usually blacklisted by default on most distros. I don't know why they even include them or the nouveau drivers in the kernel source. The proprietary drivers from broadcom require a piece of firmware that someone had extracted from the firmware blob of some broadcom NIC. The driver is built against the running kernel, so if you upgrade the kernel, which I do at least twice a year, you have to rebuild the driver. I'm a Slacker so I'm used to compiling software from source, but I finally started checking who made the wifi card.

I've never used the Nvidia drivers because I not a gamer or a videophile, and I usually buy AMD machines. The amdgpu module works just fine, and so does the i915 Intel module. That being said, I've never heard anyone complain about the proprietary Nvidia drivers. If someone prefers Nvidia gpus, whatever their reason, and either prefers to run Linux or is considering moving to Linux, that's part of running a Linux machine. Things get a tad bit hackish, even after almost 35 years. When I first started running Linux 23 years ago, you expected things not to work out of the box, especially the GUI, and networking, and the information wasn't easy to find, or as abundant.

You pay a price for the convenience of Microsoft. Pay $2500 for a machine and it's not clear if you actually own it, because you don't have full control.

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Kevin_Kofler@reddit

I don't know why they even include them or the nouveau drivers in the kernel source.

Because there are people like me who will not use proprietary drivers out of principle (or even simply because they are fed up of recompiling out-of-tree drivers all the time) and will use the Free Software driver no matter how buggy it is.

Also keep in mind that the proprietary drivers tend to be buggy, too. (That also goes for NVidia. I used to comaintain the Fedora KDE/Plasma packages for several years. I had to close dozens of bugs as CANTFIX because they were due to a bug in the NVidia proprietary driver that only NVidia could fix.)

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Distinct_Adeptness7@reddit

I haven't needed it in 4 or 5 years, but the b43-fwcutter package is still on Slackbuilds.org, which tells me the b43 firmware isn't included in linux-firmware, although everything else is. It's gotten huge over the years. I still have the HP Probook G1 with its AMD8-4500, but I use it as a development server, so it's using a LAN cable and sitting in the corner enjoying retirement. 2min55secs to boot to login prompt. I didn't realize slow she was until I got an Elitebook G7 with a 5th Gen Ryzen 5 a few years back.

Speaking of linux-firmware, I used to get ''renesas_usb_fw.mem' missing' error when creating my initrd.gz. It didn't affect anything as far as I could tell, but i don't like warning or error messages. I had a hard time tracking it down, and it's because that's isn't the name the missing blob had where I found it. It was named UPDATE.mem. I can't even remember how I stumbled across it. I renamed it and stored copies in a few places and no more message. I always wondered if anyone else has ran into this.

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twisted_nematic57@reddit

It’s a mess.

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Party_Ad_863@reddit

It's still bad, so many glitches when gaming fuck nvidia

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WarriorWebDev@reddit

On Linux Ubuntu's homepage you can see support for hardware and diffrent machines/laptops.

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BoltActionPiano@reddit

As someone who switched fully to linux a month ago and then was forced to switch to AMD and sell my current gpu with the endless issues... yeah.

AMD cards just work. Even with the latest stuff. I run HDR, VRR, modern games, accelerated video decode. It's fantastic.

[-]

tsunamionioncerial@reddit

The Intel Nvidia hybrid graphics most laptops have it's pretty bad. But not so bad you're going to notice unless you try things that need control of the graphics card line gaming or 3d applications. It using Wayland on external monitors and the laptop screen.

[-]

GeorgeBlackhole@reddit

Yes it is. I own a workstation equipped with a RTX2060 and a laptop with a RTX4090. As long as the Nvidia driver cooperates with the rest of the system and as long as you don't need to upgrade either the driver or the kernel, everything is very nice. But as soon as you need to upgrade, your experience can become arbitrarily bad. Just last night, I upgraded my openSuse 15.6 workstation and zypper decided to replace the 550 driver with the 570 one, effectively breaking my system and crashing the display manager. Only a manual driver downgrade restored my system. And I even used the official Nvidia repo for OpenSuse.

[-]

BulletDust@reddit

KDE Neon user here, in 8 years I have never experienced the issues you're describing - In fact Nvidia driver installation/updates couldn't be easier using the Launchpad Nvidia PPA.

To update to the beta driver, I open terminal and issue the command 'sudo apt install nvidia-driver-370' - In under 5 mins the driver is installed and I reboot to a perfectly usable desktop.

If I want to roll back the driver, I open terminal and issue the command 'sudo apt install nvidia-driver-365' - In under 5 mins the driver is rolled back and I reboot to a perfectly usable desktop.

Only last week Ubuntu LTS 24.04 updated to the 6.11 kernel, I didn't have to recompile the driver via dkms at all - Everything just works.

[-]

mimavox@reddit

I'm using a 2060 on Linux Mint, and I don't have these problems. Everything updates just fine every time.

[-]

GeorgeBlackhole@reddit

Well my laptop runs Ubuntu Linux and the issues are similar. It's even more tricky since the system relies on OEM kernels and then good luck finding a working combination of kernel version and Nvidia driver version. A kernel upgrade broke the system and the only way to boot it is staying on kernel version 6.1-oem

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mimavox@reddit

Sorry to hear that. I'm only pointing out that not all Linux user have these problems.

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Willing-Sundae-6770@reddit

As an nvidia user.... eh

It's really a "try it for yourself and see". Many don't have issues with the way they use their computer.

I have some minor issues that have grated on me for a long time. D3D12 games run worse in proton. nvidia constantly breaks suspend on my system. HDR doesn't work. I don't get hardware acceleration with waydroid, and video acceleration in my browser is spotty at best.

You may not have these issues. If you're looking for a new system, I would advise against buying nvidia. If you already have existing hardware, try it for yourself and make a decision from there.

[-]

mdirks225@reddit

It’s not bad.

My current experience on a Precision 7750 is that the dual intel/nvidia switching doesn’t work, leading to a 2 hour battery life. While on windows I could crank out 10-11 hours easily.

[-]

felipec@reddit

I have a laptop with an RTX 3060. First time using nvidia on linux, and I haven't had much problems.

There was a bug in the driver that was corrupting the memory and ended up corrupting the filesystem, but it was quickly fixed.

It actually wasn't a big issue for me, and the performance is worth the "minor" issues IMO.

[-]

Pink_Slyvie@reddit

The Intel/Nvidia combo is pretty nice. I use nvidia-exec to only turn on the GPU when I'm gaming. I don't always turn it on.

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m4nf47@reddit

I've been using Fedora on my work laptop for a while since moving off RHEL and Nvidia driver just works most of the time. I'm not a gamer though so YMMV.

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FortuneIIIPick@reddit

Is it "still" bad? I've used all nVidia cards since I started using Ubuntu in 2006. Your question is illogical.

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SuAlfons@reddit

It is not bad. Never had been.

You only need to manually install the proprietary driver for them. The corresponding components for Intel and AMD come with the kernel, as they are provided as open source.

So it's more a point of convenience to AMD over nVidia.

The Nvidia drivers sometimes can fail to load - e.g. when the kernel got updated, but the driver did not.
It doesn't happen every time on an update, but it can.

Then there is the topic of whether or not nVidia came around implementing more of the stuff required to support Wayland. But I don't look into that too often, as the Nvidia machines in our house run Windows (old potato with a 1030, daughter's laptop with a 1650 mobile and a 3060ti in son's desktop PC). I wouldn't hesitate to put Linux onto any of them if they wanted me to

[-]

AmarildoJr@reddit

I have a desktop with a 4070 Ti Super so I don't know a whole lot about NVIDIA on laptops, but the best experience I found is with LMDE/Cinnamon. I have zero complaints with this OS/DE combo.

[-]

theogmrme01@reddit

RTX2060 owner here, I've had a stable build on Debian and completed GTA5 story mode without issue, back in 2022/2023. Required a lot of manual tinkering, command line work, and was positively stuck using xorg/x11/X

Tried KDE Neon on a much newer AMD machine, with the same GPU, all good up until installing the GPU drivers. I let the Ubuntu driver command line tool choose for me, I think it chose 555, and again, it's back to xorg/x11/X. It seems the drivers and Wayland are still not fans of each other, and there's no way I am going to leave performance on the table with Nouveau.

Gonna give some of the replies in this post a shot when I next boot into KDE Neon, seems like 535 might be more stable.

[-]

Momooncrack@reddit

I've used arch mint and fedora on Nvidia for the last couple of years with little issue. Idk anything about Manjaro

[-]

diegotbn@reddit

If you haven't bought a GPU yet go with AMD over Nvidia. If you already have an Nvidia card, you'll be fine. The drivers are usually available in your package manager of choice.

I have run into a few issues with my Nvidia card but not many. My next card will be AMD.

[-]

savorymilkman@reddit

No. Nvidia not being good on Linux is a thing of the past. Now it's not GREAT, you're limited to selecting power profiles, v sync, and anti-aliasing only, but, that shouldn't be a problem as maybe 0.5% of people tinker with the ambient occlusion and all that other yada yada yada. Nvidia actually released an open source component INTO the Linux kernel which, when unlocked, didn't really do anything lol but it was a step in the right direction

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Why-are-you-geh@reddit

"Linux Laptops" aren't much special or better than a pre installed Windows laptop. There is just a pre installed distro on that laptop, nothing more. Exactly the same you can achieve on a normal laptop (with a complete wipe, no os whatsoever).

The Linux Kernel accepts the Nvidia devices as any other GPU. They are exactly compatible like on Windows.

What we want to talk about is the WM, in the end, it's the common thing that isn't compatible with that or this GPU, most cases Nvidia. Hyprland doesn't officially support nvidia, BUT the community did it unofficially. With that said, it depends highly on your choice of customization. An Arch Linux installation with kde plasma with xorg is enough for you to play any native games you like. The display server will be managed by your igpu, in most cases it's separated between display rendering and 3d rendering (igpu and dgpu for laptops).

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dinosaursdied@reddit

That's not 100 percent true. Linux laptop sellers like system76 work with manufacturers like clevo to develop models that contain coreboot compatible chipsets and other features. While clevo may have a near identical model available for sale as a blank laptop, they usually make tweaks to appeal to Windows users that can be detrimental to the Linux experience.

It's also well known that while desktop Linux has matured a lot, laptops are one of the hardest places to install it. A lot of unique laptop features rely on drivers only available on Windows.

[-]

chic_luke@reddit

This. I help out people install and configure Linux on their laptops at my university as a form of "volunteering", so I have had the privilege and the honour of imaging tens of laptops with Linux. Everything from the cute and huggable Frameworks / Tuxdeos to gaming laptops that look like spaceships.

The variability is huge. On "Linux laptops" like ThinkPads with Linux mentioned in the psref everything mostly worked. On random laptops, it has been very common that something would be extremely broken. Things you don't usually expect and you don't find out about immediately. Virtualization, proper CPU scheduling, proper WLAN card operation, the full speaker array working properly, proper suspend / resume ("my display turns off when I close the lid and the screen locks" implies not your suspend worked fine!).

Get a Linux laptop if you are serious about using Linux.

[-]

Why-are-you-geh@reddit

For 5 laptops that I have, I never ever had a problem installing any distro on it. Because of course you don't have a type CCleaner driver by Intel only made for dumb windows 11 users, for any Linux distro.

You basically don't "miss" any "unique" laptop feature. For example, card reader or fingerprint scanner are also supported by various distros, because the drivers are mostly open source and compatible with many devices.

A manufacturer selling "specific Linux Laptops" is nothing more than someone making much money with promoting stuff that you can easily customize yourself in minutes for free.

It might not be 100% true, but 90%. The 10% are the "unique features" that are absolutely not unique and only a handful of people actually use them, ON a Linux installation.

[-]

Top-Classroom-6994@reddit

KDE plasma and Gnome both runs well on wayland on Nvidia too. Most of the time wlroots based things have the problem, and it probably got better at this point

[-]

Real_Bad_Horse@reddit

Explicit sync made it's way into one of the Arch wlroots packages. I don't recall when that happened but I run Plasma/sway depending on what I'm doing and both work great on Wayland. But sway took some tinkering, as it always does.

[-]

Szer1410@reddit (OP)

Okay I get it

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TONKAHANAH@reddit

I feel like "bad" is kinda relative here.

does it work? yeah, you can make it work, its better than its ever been!

is it bad compared to other options? well, its not the best option, suppose I'll put it that way.

When it was time to upgrade from my 1080, I went AMD and got a 6700xt and boy did it just make everything less of a headache to deal with cuz it just works out of the box. the only thing I really needed was corectl to under volt it so the hotspot temp didnt nuke its self, not sure why the drivers dont manage that but whatever.

everything else has been easier with AMD but nvidia isnt bad, its just not as good.

[-]

theheliumkid@reddit

System76 have a great repository for Ubuntu and PopOS. The Nvidia drivers is managed beautifully. Been using it for years, no problems whatsoever.

[-]

Modern_Doshin@reddit

LM MATE 22.1 with RTX 4070. I've had 0 issues with nvidia so far (same wity my 1050ti I had too)

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Separate-Sky-1451@reddit

define "bad"

[-]

Smoke_Water@reddit

Nvidia works well on Linux. I ran NVidia GPUs for the last 10 years. Just keep in mind, the only thing you can upgrade on a laptop are storage and memory. So don't expect to be able to upgrade the CPU or GPU on the device down the road.

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Fratm@reddit

Unless you go with framework.

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bhones@reddit

This question is asked several times a day on here. I am quite sure the answers to your questions would be answered by a quick search against similar posts.

[-]

Fratm@reddit

Framework 16" laptops have an option to add a AMD GPU. Pricey, but worth it.

[-]

Getabock_@reddit

No, it is not worth it.

[-]

DK114@reddit

I was using an nvidia gtx 1080 with kubuntu wayland but recently switched to amd rx 7800 xt, still using kubuntu wayland.

It was usable with the nvidia card if you use one of the later proprietary drivers.

Only really had trouble playing some dx12 games through proton (poor performance, random crashes) Waydroid (android emulator) also doesnt work with nvidia cards.

I like that you don't have to worry about separate driver versions with AMD. Games also run more stable with higher frames but that would also be because the GPU is more recent.

[-]

Sorry-Squash-677@reddit

Sudo apt install happiness

[-]

beshoux44@reddit

You want it for gaming or Deep Learning or both ?

[-]

Szer1410@reddit (OP)

Gaming and some other stuff

[-]

dragonof_west@reddit

. I want to have a peak Linux experience, so I have been looking for laptops with dedicated AMD GPUs

HP victus with R5 5600h and RX6500M the only budget choice. I don't find any other AMD dgpu laptops in my region.

[-]

shanehiltonward@reddit

Manjaro Gnome on X11 - unstable repo

RTX4060 Ti 16gb

[-]

ClassroomNo4847@reddit

For the record Fedora or nobara are what I recommend, the latter is easiest for beginners.

[-]

ClassroomNo4847@reddit

Not at all it’s fantastic. As long as you don’t play the few games that Linux cannot support due to anticheat then you are golden and will likely have a more pleasant experience with Linux than windows, especially in 2025 after Nvidia drivers received the new update. Anything newer than 525 I believe.

[-]

Hans_Wurst_42@reddit

No issues with Debian, Fedora and EndeavourOS with 3070m here and non-free drivers.

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dark-Souls-3-Enjoyer@reddit

Been on Fedora for 5 months, I’ve had no issues with my 4080S so far. As long as you follow your distro’s recommended instructions for installing the drivers, you should be fine.

[-]

u0_a321@reddit

I personally won't recommend it , I have a laptop with rtx 4050 mobile.

The nvidia proprietary drivers have some issues which don't let your gpu utilise the maximum TGP.

So , it's not a good experience for me.

I believe this won't be a problem, if you're getting a pc instead of a laptop.

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222fps@reddit

I'm just switched to nvidia and have zero issues, altho I am using xorg because wayland sucked even on amd when I tried it.

[-]

word-sys@reddit

Firstly System76 has Pop OS which is Ubuntu based, has no performance difference from Ubunt Secondly NVIDIA is still bad but its not bad at all, but i still prefer AMD because high performance, max compatibility, no driver issues

[-]

my_other_leg@reddit

I use fedora and Nvidia with steam. Works good

[-]

Aki_wo_Kudasai@reddit

I installed fedora 41 cinnamon spin last night and couldn't get the Nvidia drivers to work at all. It was a frustrating hour of attempts and reboots.

I might give up on cinnamon because I feel like I got it working on the base fedora 34 gnome image years ago.

I really wish this was as simple as it needed to be, rather than an entire study season to get going right.

[-]

nosrednehnai@reddit

I have an RTX 3060, and Wayland is unusable. I went with Fedora for current packages, Cinnamon for X11, and the steam flatpak, and everything seems to work well enough.

[-]

henrythedog64@reddit

Bazzite sounds pretty good for what you're looking for

[-]

tahaan@reddit

nVidia works just fine under Linux. It is just a couple of extra steps. The AMD drivers are open source, so easy for the community to package and maintain. The nVidia drivers are not, so these must be downloaded from the vendor.

To be more precise: there are open source nvidia drivers, but these do not perform on par with the one made by nvidia, so for decent performance you want to get the closed source driver.

[-]

mqfr98j4@reddit

Best machine I ever had was AMD CPU with integrated graphics + dedicated Nvidia GPU. Have you explored that route? I use prime-run for my applications that require the extra horsepower, but let the integrated graphics do all of the other light work. Best combo, especially for a laptop that you may not want a hungry GPU running on full-time. I have used Nvidia on my Linux machines for at least the last 5-7yrs with only a few problems (some of which I would blame on my tinkering).

[-]

Cats7204@reddit

Nvidia is fine, just make sure to blacklist nouveau and install nvidia-open or nvidia. Wayland (at least in KDE) still has some minor issues but GNOME and KDE in X11 work perfectly.

[-]

Boomer_Nurgle@reddit

Personal experience and I'm running a rolling release distro so things might be different in distros with older versions of stuff, but ever since the 565 (I think, bad at remembering versions) drivers released I've honestly had no issues with Wayland, it honestly has been working better than x11 for me while before that it was an absolute mess.

[-]

Cats7204@reddit

I'm on Fedora 41 KDE 6 and Wayland is way better ever since driver 565 aswell, but my main issue is that whenever my PC wakes from sleep it takes forever and journald says that the whole kde DM crashed, and that kwin_wayland_drm pageflip timed-out, and it literally says "this is a kernel bug" lmao.

[-]

Boomer_Nurgle@reddit

Oh honestly I don't really put my PC on sleep mode anymore but I remember having the same issue with x11, it'd also cause some applications to just freeze completely so I think it might be a bigger issue with sleep mode than just wayland.

[-]

suksukulent@reddit

My debian never liked repo nvidia drive, idk why, .run from nvidia works tho and the 570 driver works well on wayland

Laptop (Arch) - got a good deal so another nvidia, also works semi-well, just because of optimus-gpu-switching shenanigans. but on X11 optimus-manager was great, doesn't support wayland but hey, it still switches on startup according to bat/charger state.

Summed up, sometimes required tinkering, but it was very usable most of the time and I'd expect it not getting worse. On 'mainstream' supported distro it should be fine.

[-]

114sbavert@reddit

Funny story: I have a PC with integrated graphics and I don't own a GPU yet but I plan to after getting a job in Software Engineering. But anyway, 3 days ago I had a nightmare that my parents decided to buy me a GPU as a gift but they didn't ask me and bought me an nVidia and I was throwing a tantrum cause I use Linux 😭😭

[-]

Academic_Army_6425@reddit

The Wayland support is not great, there are multiple issues with scrolling performance and overall UI smoothness on high refresh rates screens and setups with multiples displays.

There is also an issue with nvidia GSP power management, which you can't disable on nvidia-open drivers.

More details:
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/stutering-and-low-fps-scrolling-in-browsers-on-wayland-when-gsp-firmware-is-enabled/311127
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-560/+bug/2081140
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3461
https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1drlud4/cant_disable_gsp_firmware_with_latest_stable/

[-]

morganbo85@reddit

AMD GPUs = best Linux support, but laptops with dedicated AMD GPUs are scarce. If you go Nvidia, Nobara, Fedora, or Pop!_OS are better choices than Manjaro for smoother driver support.

If you're mostly gaming, the 780M is solid for lighter titles, but an RTX 3050+ gives way more performance if you don’t mind using proprietary drivers.

[-]

aqjo@reddit

No, no problems for me.
I would rethink Manjaro though.

[-]

x0xxin@reddit

I can't speak to Manjaro but Steam on Ubuntu is working awesome with my RTX3090. I installed the driver's using Ubuntu's documentation: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/nvidia-drivers-installation

[-]

HenryUK_@reddit

It's definitely possible and if you want to use wayland especially I'd definitely recommend getting a laptop with a mux switch so you can have a better experience. Kde works fine on optimus after some configuration but multi gpu on linux isn't perfect yet, especially if you want to use hyprland for example it's better to have everything running off one gpu like a desktop. With a mux switch, you have everything running off the dedicated gpu only, including the laptop screen itself. I only recently found out that my laptop had a mux switch this entire time and its been a dream come true. You can disable the igpu with linux as well if it causes issues too, but then your laptop screen itself won't work, that's why I'd recommend a mux switch.

In terms of best compatibility with laptops, I'd say Pop_OS as I've used it myself, but the drivers are old since it's more of a stable and compatibility focused distro. That's my opinion though and it's always best to do research and testing yourself to find the right distro for you.

You can get a surprising amount of software working on nvidia laptops with time and your sanity slowly decreasing, but the mux switch makes it easier and you have more options. The only issue with running everything off the dgpu however is battery life, however if the charger is connected most of the time it's pretty good.

I'm personally using the MSI GP66 Leopard (RTX 3080), it has a mux switch and works well, only major issue is temps under load but it hasn't died on me yet after 3 years now I think, I wouldn't recommend it though for that reason. It works great with arch and nixos.

[-]

TheCrispyChaos@reddit

Out of all the Arch-based distros, the last one I’d want maintained by the Manjaro team

[-]

hirushanT@reddit

I think what you mean, does NVK driver is good yet? answer is No. Proprietary drivers had no issues. Preciously it had problems with Wayland but not anymore

[-]

Equivalent_Bird@reddit

It's not Nvidia is bad, it's the vendor lock-in model is bad. It's not about whether it looks good today, it's about how likely will it turn bad tomorrow.

[-]

Inevitable_Noise_769@reddit

nvidia drivers work well on linux for years, depends on how you define well tho

[-]

ExtraTNT@reddit

X11 works well with 900 and newer…

[-]

Daathchild@reddit

No, NVIDIA isn't bad on Linux anymore.

Wayland even works pretty well these days. A year ago, I wouldn't have used Wayland over X (especially for gaming)if someone held a gun to my head (gaming on NVIDIA on X11 was fine, even back then), but after being forced to switch over an X11 bug that found its way into every distro I use (including Gentoo), I gave it another shot, and it actually works pretty well. I recommend using the iGPU for everything but games and the dedicated NVIDIA card to play games (which is the default configuration on most distros).

The NVIDIA drivers themselves are even mostly open source now.

You also don't really need to buy a Linux-specific laptop. I'd recommend getting a general gaming computer that you like and just install whatever on that. Hardware support won't be a problem unless you're running something like Debian or one of the BSDs.

I'd recommend CachyOS instead of Manjaro, personally. It's got optimized packages for newer CPUs and uses most of the same packages as Arch (basically just recompiled Arch repos) with a few added and precompiled from the AUR and a graphical installer and a preconfigured desktop (if those things matter to you). All the advantages of Manjaro with none of the hassle.

[-]

Damglador@reddit

Yes. It's usable, but if you want to game - AMD has objectively better performance.

[-]

theqat@reddit

It’s still kind of spotty. I had a lot of issues with suspend and resume over about eight months using nvidia+fedora, and there weren’t definitive solutions that I could figure out. I finally gave up on that install a few weeks ago for other reasons, but the nvidia experience didn’t help.

[-]

Disastrous-Account10@reddit

I run a 4060 with Ubuntu on my Lenovo laptop and it's a peach , I have no issues so far

[-]

LocalNightDrummer@reddit

There are laptops with AMD dedicated GPUs. Check Tuxedo Computers.

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inmemumscar06@reddit

I’ve been using my 2070 Super on arch and gentoo for years now. I have never had any problems. For the past few months I have been using Hyprland, zero Wayland problems. I have honestly never understood the nvidia driver fearmongering. Install nvidia-dkms and don’t think about it anymore.

[-]

josegarrao@reddit

AFAIK, Mnajro, PoP!OS, Zorin, Bazzite, EndeavorOS and CachyOS.

PoP!OS has an ISO image exclusively to NVidia hardware.

[-]

ahferroin7@reddit

There aren’t really any great options for dedicated AMD GPUs right now, because AMD has unfortunately not released a ‘new’ GPU architecture since 2022 and are not expected to release cards with a new GPU architecture until some time early this year (and even then, given past experience, it will probably take 12-18 months for them to do any new mobile cards).

That said, if you are not gaming and not doing any stuff with OpenCL, a 780M is more than sufficient (hell, even if you are gaming, it may be sufficient depending on what games you’re playing).

AMD is still on average a better experience on Linux for most things than NVIDIA, with OpenCL and other GPU compute stuff being the exception (CUDA is annoying to get working, but AMD’s ROCm is a steaming pile of trash with a huge number of limitations that randomly breaks things on many upgrades), but most of the difference these days is that AMD works out of box with no user intervention needed, while NVIDIA still requires dealing with third-party drivers. That said, both will generally be much better the newer the kernel, firmware, and in NVIDIA’s case drivers are.

Separately, if you want the best possible Linux experience, I would argue that Manjaro is at odds with that (at least pick a distro that isn’t known for infrastructure issues).

[-]

luscious_lobster@reddit

Fuck you Nvidia

[-]

floeh86@reddit

I have a Lenovo LOQ-15 laptop that has a Nvidia 4050 laptop GPU. Have been using Linux on many systems for years at that point but not with Nvidia, so I thought „let’s try it and see if Nvidia on Linux is as bad as many tell“ and so I chose bazzite, as this is supposed to be a great out-of-the-box experience for gaming, no matter the hardware.

So far, there is only one thing that is maybe a deal breaker and that is for me very unfortunate to have to live with:

If you use a distro with Wayland and don’t use the built-in laptop screen to play on, you will very likely never run your games at more than 60 fps on the external monitor. It is a known bug for KDE and Gnome that is Nvidia exclusive on laptops as far as I understand the posts I read about it. This can also cause your framerate to frequently alternate between your let’s say v-sync 60 and half of that. But even if you unlock the framerate it will be much less than on the internal display.

From the posts I read, it is due the way Wayland handles the output of the frame: It’s rendered on your dGPU, then sent to your iGPU, and then sent back to your dGPU to output to the screen.

Other than that, there might be games that will not allow you to use all the features in the graphics settings compared to windows due to proton implementations (which will improve over time). Also full motion video cutscenes might not work right now, but that is also being worked on. Nvidia DLSS and framegen should be available from Proton 9.0.4 and upwards. If in doubt use proton experimental.

[-]

shroddy@reddit

Usually, you can disable the iGPU in your uefi settings somewhere

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floeh86@reddit

Tried it and it does not help. The UEFI does allow setting to iGPU, dGPU or hybrid. There is no option to disable. But setting to dGPU does not improve anything. Trust me, I did my research on that. Otherwise I would not have found out all the other stuff about the problem. I also tried x11, but that is only slightly better as there are other problems that arise when using a x11 session on bazzite.

[-]

Ragas@reddit

It's still bad.

It's showing signs to be better in the future though.

[-]

D4rkFamiliarity@reddit

I tried using Linux as my main OS on my RTX 3080 build. It ran okay for the most part (fedora Wayland GNOME) but things like VRR are still broken and had flickering (tracked by this issue open for almost a year now). Very demanding games had a VRAM leak at some point and the game would start to stutter. Competitive titles like OW worked great under proton and so did a lot of the Yakuza games. I ended up switching to windows because something broke with a fedora update, and I couldn’t figure out how to troubleshoot it and I didn’t want to reinstall again.

[-]

MartinWoad@reddit

I bought an RTX 4070 June this year and built a rig with an AMD cpu. I installed Arch through archinstall and did not have a single problem since. Except one that I had to use Xorg because the Wayland session didn't work at all, but I just didn't bother fixing it.

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bigfatoctopus@reddit

So... I've been running linux/nvidia since the early 2000's. I've never known of a case where nvidia was bad. Not sure why I keep hearing people say this. But then again, I try to stay in the debian/ubuntu vein. (But even when I was into SUSE way back when, nVidia worked good)

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cain261@reddit

Even recently I’ve run into games that will run on Steam Deck and won’t run on my arch machine. I can only think it’s the nvidia gpu not properly working with proton.

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theaveragemillenial@reddit

What do you mean by bad?

Nvidia official drivers work perfectly well and have done for a very long time, I've been using Linux since around 2003.

There have been some issues with suspend in the past, but as an older pc user I've never gotten into the habit of using that anyway and always turn my PCs off completely, desktops and laptops.

I think the whole confusion with Nvidia on Linux has to do with the open source driver that ships with distros as default having really poor performance.

But the actual Nvidia drivers are perfectly fine and just as good as AMDs offering.

With all that said, from an ideology perspective any pc or laptop I build now would probably have AMD GPU, but I'm not chasing absolute performance thesedays.

[-]

OCPetrus@reddit

I don't see the closed source nvidia drivers as an ideological problem. The amd drivers contain binary blobs, too, so that's not the point.

The problem is that the closed source nvidia drivers integrate poorly to the rest of the system. To interact with the kernel, the drivers need special kernel blobs to be compiled. This means that any time you upgrade the kernel, you need to recompile the nvidia kernel blob. Probably same thing when you change driver version as they go hand in hand.

But the worst part isn't even the compiling. With amd or intel that have the drivers as part of the kernel source code tree, the developers and maintainers of the kernel source are in charge of maintaining the gpu drivers. If you're not a software developer this might sound weird or even like a bad thing, but it will result in far more stable codebases.

When basic building blocks in the kernel are changed, the developers of the change update all the users as well. This means that all hardware drivers in the kernel source code tree are updated. For drivers outside of the kernel tree the developers of respective drivers need to make sure to upgrade themselves. In reality, this never happens.

What most users of external drivers do is that they try out a lot of different driver versions until they find something that kinda works. This is horrible, but sadly a lot of people are used to not expect better. When you use drivers from kernel tree, life is just so much smoother that you could never imagine yourself going back.

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Charming-Designer944@reddit

Nvidia have opened up their kernel driver now so that will hopefully improve significantly. And even before that the Linux glue layer has always been open and actively patched by Linux distro maintainers to work with newer kernels than the versions Nvidia officially supports.

The bulk of the Nvidia driver is actually in the closed userspace blobs (shared libraries). The kernel driver is mainly providing access to the GPU hardware in a controlled manner.

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Kevin_Kofler@reddit

So the "open" kernel driver does not change much. It is entirely useless without the proprietary userspace blobs and not compatible with the Nouveau kernel driver, and so will not be built in distributions shipping Nouveau (and/or NVK). So you still have to rebuild it with every kernel update.

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Charming-Designer944@reddit

It is an improvement.

+ Maintenance of the kernel component of the driver is eased as there is full insight in what the kernel side of the driver is doing.
+ Being a open project there is a direct communication channel between Linux maintainers and the NVidia driver developers. A clear unified path for reporting issues and providing suggested improvements.
+ Solves licensing issues allowing distributions to include the Nvidia kernel driver without violating the Kernel license.

but the driver is not usable without the closed source userspace components. And do not coexist with Nouveau.

Maybe the Nvidia-open driver and Nouveau will eventually meet in future, allowing both userspace implementations to share the same kernel driver, but quite unlikely. Nvidia-open however already provides tools for use with Nouveau (GPU firmware extraction).

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

[-]

NightZT@reddit

Concerning the suspend problems I found this answer yesterday and it worked out pretty well for me: https://askubuntu.com/a/1436921

Set up Kubuntu on a Lenovo Thinkpad W540 with Nvidia Quadro K2100M several weeks ago and installed the 470 driver. Had problems when closing the lid but it's now working after following the tutorial

[-]

Szer1410@reddit (OP)

Okay thanks. I have a laptop with mx250 and in most games I get twice as fps in windows that in Linux.

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thalionquses@reddit

Problem is that this card is based on the Pascal architecture which lacks some hardware features which are needed for good performance with Vulkan.

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MeanEYE@reddit

And by perfectly well what they mean eventually your hardware will stop being supported by nVidia and you'll be forced to use legacy driver. You will occasionally break your OS on upgrades. Not frequently but enough to keep things spicy. There will be glitches from time to time be it waking from sleep or starting some game which does something exotic or new version of your desktop environment of choice might break things. Not a lot, but enough to keep things spicy.

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theaveragemillenial@reddit

I still dual boot for some games and the performance difference is marginal, with Linux sometimes being on top. With an RTX 2080 Super on desktop, and an RTX 2080 MAX-Q on my laptop.

MX250 is a pretty low end offering, I think I've only ever used those series GPUs in media centres.

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sky_blue_111@reddit

The best options are still intel or AMD.

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Victor_Quebec@reddit

I have used Nvidia cards only since I moved to Linux (Pop OS) five years ago and never regretted it.

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gargravarr2112@reddit

I've been using Ubuntu on my Aorus X7 laptop since I bought it in 2020. Ubuntu handles the nVidia drivers extremely well. The GTX 1080 performs well and I'm even able to get CUDA workloads going without issue. I can jump into a game whenever I feel like it.

Obviously the drivers are closed-source binaries and you're totally reliant on nVidia to get them right. AMD contribute their drivers to the kernel. I believe Nouveau has gotten 3D acceleration going in the last few years but is still way behind the official ones.

In summary, if you wind up buying nVidia, it's not a terrible experience.

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realestatedeveloper@reddit

I have an external GPU with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070. It was a bit tricky to get the correct drivers for Ubuntu 22 installed, but I have it working well. Took a couple of hours to get everything right.

It was much much much more challenging to get my NVIDIA 1650 gpu to work with my RaspberryPI CM4. Took about 2 weeks worth of trial and error (maybe 30 hours total, no joke) to get it to work consistently.

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DreSmart@reddit

Is manageable. Get CachyOs or Bazzite instead

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Ok-Brick-6250@reddit

hello i am also intrested i am gonna propbably buy a dektop pc with ryzen and some 3050rtx are they good under linux

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mythrowawayuhccount@reddit

AMD offers the best driver experience, however there are nvidia drivers for linux.

The kernel offers nVidia nforce open source drivers and nvidia releases driver packages independently as well.

Depending on distro, they may offer gpu proprietary drivers. I believe manjaro does in its hardware manager console (mhwd or something close to that).

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/

Manjaro is Arch base with their own repos and software. They also modify packages from arch and hold back updates.

Its a very well rounded distro and offers a lot especially for a new user.

But dont expect to run a super computer on manjaro.

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SysGh_st@reddit

It's getting better, but nVidia still has plenty left to walk.

[-]

Aristotelaras@reddit

There is a 10-30% gap between windows and linux on directx 12 games on nvidia cards but the gap is closing fast.

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glad-k@reddit

I have not experienced Linux before this pc but yeah it kinda sucks, it's fine once the drivers are installed but sometimes the driver just breaks on Wayland and stuff so I would recommend amd

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Kevin_Kofler@reddit

There is still the same issue that the vendor driver is proprietary and completely different from the upstream Nouveau or NVK driver (the kernel driver is always called Nouveau, then on top of that there is either the Vulkan-centric Mesa driver NVK for newer hardware or the OpenGL-centric Mesa driver Nouveau for older hardware).

If you choose the proprietary driver, you will always have the same issues with the driver (the glue source code between the proprietary blob and the compiled distribution kernels) needing to be recompiled for every kernel update, with relying on a proprietary libGL instead of the distribution default Mesa libGL, with some applications or desktop environments sometimes crashing due to driver bugs that are impossible for anybody outside of NVidia to fix, etc.

If you choose the Nouveau/NVK driver, you may have to pick a chipset that is not the latest to get support right now, you will not be able to use proprietary features such as CUDA, and you may also run into bugs (which are technically fixable by more people than with the proprietary driver, but that will not necessarily help you as a user in the short term).

That is why the recommendation has always been, is, and will always be to pick a hardware whose manufacturer actively supports Free Software with Free-as-in-Speech manufacturer drivers. (Intel does that for IGPs/GPUs, and AMD now does it to some extent with their "Open Core" GPU/IGP driver, though they still have proprietary features in the "Pro" blob.)

[-]

positivcheg@reddit

You are contradicting yourself so hard. You can use any distribution and setup it yourself. I remember I were using Ubuntu in past, like in 2015 on my laptop with Nvidia. Optimus was working, kind of. It mostly never worked out of the box unless you picked up some distribution that did some scripts for Nvidia specifically but oh god it's so Windows-ish. You just pick any linux you want, go to arch wiki and see what you need to do to make Nvidia work like this page https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA_Optimus#Using_PRIME_render_offload

Also Nvidia releases officially proprietary drivers for Linux. Meaning unless they fucked up really hard for specific driver it should work on par with Windows, period. If something doesn't work then go google and see how to fix it - that's a "peak Linux experience" that you might be confusing with "install Linux and have everything work perfectly out of the box".

[-]

mimavox@reddit

Works fine for me.

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crazedizzled@reddit

No, it works just fine

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Craftkorb@reddit

I never had issues with nvidia GPUs in 15 years. Even on Arch I had a faulty driver once in all those years, and that again is a decade ago. This is mostly on desktop machines. But also on my notebook with a nvidia dGPU it works flawlessly.

Some years ago I tried AMD because "drivers are amazing". I went back to nvidia after a year.

Nowadays I do a lot of LLM and GenAi stuff, and while AMDs ROCm is getting better support, it simply pales when compared to support for nvidias CUDA. If that's not one of your use-cases then you don't have to care of course.

[-]

By-Pit@reddit

BuT cUdA is DeAaAD! /s

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Craftkorb@reddit

Dude I wish that OpenCL would've taken off, or the Vulkan Compute Shader stuff, but nope CUDA won by sheer marketing force. We're all worse off for it too.

[-]

By-Pit@reddit

Dang CUDA won, the evil must be defeated we need to stay strong and unite! FIGHT WITH OUR DOWNVOTES!

[-]

fetching_agreeable@reddit

Never was.

[-]

Mast3r_waf1z@reddit

It depends, my laptop's GPU is trash and is very annoying to use.

Sway also has crazy screen tearing on nvidia

[-]

Artificiousus@reddit

I use an Nvidia GPU on a Ubuntu laptop for machine learning and office software not really for playing games. My experience is that updates will break your installation (sometimes Nvidia, sometimes the WiFi device, the source card etc). So I have been using successfully my notebook for years by having one installation working and then disabling the updates. This solution lasts for a couple of years until you can't install new software. At that point I will install the new Ubuntu version from scratch. People say this is risky but I have never been compromised on security. And my computer is ready to work all the time rather than failing after an update and having to spend a couple of hours beingin it back to work.

[-]

mephinet@reddit

If you're not into gaming, I would recommend going intel-only.

I have an intel-only and a nvidia GPU notebook, and I can assure you that the discrete GPU has no advantage in everyday usage (apart from gaming), but adds a lot of hazzle, drains the battery faster, etc.

"I can disable the GPU if I don't need it" is not the whole story because the Displayport is only connected to the GPU in my Lenovo - so no external monitors without discrete GPU...

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D20sAreMyKink@reddit

In my experience a Linux laptop with hybrid NVIDIA graphics can work fine and be absolutely stable for gaming, but you will have to put some work tinkering it. Picking a good distro that works with Nvidia, has new drivers (not manjaro they have lots of issues EndeavorOS is the closest good one). Can help with that.

If you're interested in HDR and gaming and are not somewhat comfortable with Arch and/or tinkering I would recommend picking one of the gaming oriented distros like popOS, nobara, garuda (maybe) or relying on good documentation like the Arch wiki.

The pinned sub post has very useful info including distro suggestions.

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ElephantWithBlueEyes@reddit

> I want to have a peak Linux experience

You mean spending 1 hour googling every little thing you're not familiar with?

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MrProTwiX@reddit

U can do it, AMD is still a better experience though

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dothack@reddit

I use Mint with nvidia laptop and PC and game on both, never had any problems.

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flyhmstr@reddit

Mint, 4060rtx, nvidia 535 driver, works just fine (MSI tomahawk motherboard)

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By-Pit@reddit

Usually if you are into Linux you are into tech so you are into AMD. So I'd say go for the most supported possible experience, in the same way I suggest Ubuntu for more support, but you also need to know that you won't be taken seriously if you don't use some less common distro, not that it matters, or does it? ;)

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Krucz3k@reddit

Arch + hyprland on a 3090 runs fine for me

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dank_saus@reddit

i have a rtx 3080 on my pc and it works fine on xorg. i have no idea what the state of nvida is on wayland though

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alexatheannoyed@reddit

not for me on arch and kde. literally have 0 problems with my 3090.

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Spammerton1997@reddit

I've found that linux mint and popOS offer really fool-proof Nvidia support, and it's worked pretty well on linux mint which I use now

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aa_conchobar@reddit

Does it have to be a laptop?

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Leverquin@reddit

I have 1050 inside, and 1660 outside my pc. Works. I can even play games. Have issue for sure but not breaking issues

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Queasy-Mix2714@reddit

Running a 4090 with Wayland with arch since 555 beta.

Steam games run great, every game engine I've tried works great (unreal, unity, godot, bevy). I don't use gpu for compute stuff or ML so can't speak to that.

Only issue I can think of is that floating tooltip menus in xwayland applications are randomly mangled. Maybe there's a fix but I keep procrastinating looking into it.

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flemtone@reddit

Nvidia will always have it's issues until the driver is fully open-source, and depending on what you need the laptop for will tell you which to go for.

Personally I have a mini-pc with 780m graphics and can play many titles in med or low settings just fine, but if you plan to run AAA titles then go for the 3050 and Linux Mint or Pop!Os.

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okimborednow@reddit

It's fine, I've not ran into any issues with a laptop 3050ti

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Szer1410@reddit (OP)

Okay thanks

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Direct_Raspberry_933@reddit

RemindMe! 1 week