How bad really are Nvidia drivers still?

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ShreeGrey@reddit

I'm using arch with 3070. Everything works great. I play cyberpunk with no problems. I'm on Nvidia-open drivers. Problems maybe if you have old Nvidia cards. Better to use something newer rx 2xxx

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computer-machine@reddit

I'd had no issues with quadro fx 570m, gtx 570Ti/660/770/970 from 2008 to 2022 or 23. I forget when that last one died on me.

Only real anoyance on TW was occasional rollbacks before updating a day or two later for the separate Nvidia repo to catch up to new kernel.

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ShreeGrey@reddit

That's just what I read on forums. I personally had no issues with my card.

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eattherichnow@reddit

3060, on nvidia-open + KDE, and I play games via Steam/Proton, including recently Clair Obscur and Helldivers 2. It's fine.

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Former 2070 Super owner and recently upgraded to a 5080 (needed HDMI 2.1). In my experience, they're not the best. Not great. Not terrible. You'd have a (perhaps marginally idk) better experience on windows for bugs and performance. There's a general hit to performance on DX12 titles which Nvidia only just started looking into. Installation is not that disimilar to Windows. You install the driver and you're off most of the time. It's just a package on linux rather than an EXE you download.

When I was using Ubuntu, I'd frequently have to reinstall the driver after driver updates left me at terminal login, but that was a few years ago at this point. On Fedora earlier this year when I tried it for a few months, I had a few instances of a similar problem caused by Fedora allowing the system to shut down before the kernal module finished compiling after an update, resulting in defaulting to the nouveau driver. That was more a problem with Fedora than Nvidia though, as the update command exits before the compilation step, leading you to think it was done. It happened a couple of times after a shutdown update, which led me to never doing them again. I've mostly been using Void for the last 3 or 4 years and had none of those problems.

Games mostly work fine, outside of the performance problems mentioned before. I couldn't play cyberpunk until about a year ago because of a bug in the nvidia driver that caused the game to crash after a few minutes in-game, but that's the only one I can remember in 5 years of linux gaming on nvidia.

Now I await the "not on my machine" comments.

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Farados55@reddit

If you’re on GNOME you’re probably fine. They’ve had great support for NVIDIA on Wayland for years now. And I always switch to the proprietary drivers on a fresh install.

I’m on Fedora. I know some distros have better support for gaming like PopOS I think? People mention that a lot.

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altermeetax@reddit

All desktops work with Nvidia, it's not a desktop-specific thing.

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Farados55@reddit

But not all desktops have good Wayland graphics support. Thus me having 0 problems on GNOME for years and then having black screens and graphics artifacts on KDE Plasma a year ago. Whereas people without NVIDIA were using Plasma with Wayland have been enjoying it flawlessly.

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altermeetax@reddit

Well, all desktops available today have good support of Nvidia on the display servers that they support. Of course Xfce doesn't support Wayland, but it supports it on neither Nvidia nor AMD. I use Plasma on Nvidia flawlessly today.

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Farados55@reddit

Like I said, a year or two ago I couldn't even boot into Plasma on Wayland, support has definitely gotten better but I still have flickering after a while.

Never had any graphics artifacts on GNOME.

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altermeetax@reddit

Okay, sure, I acknowledged that, but I experience the opposite.

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Big-Afternoon-3422@reddit

Every single time I use Wayland with my tuxedo os tuxedo Laptop I'm forced to reboot and use x11 to stop the screen flickering. This issue does not exist on any other desktop.

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Farados55@reddit

Cool.

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altermeetax@reddit

Not that much :(

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mark-haus@reddit

In Wayland it can be because each desktop must make their own compositor or borrow from another one. Some compositors at least on the desktop, this can affect things like VRR and tearing as an example if the compositor doesn’t work well a driver

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altermeetax@reddit

Yeah, but I've tried several Wayland compositors and they all work on Nvidia nowadays.

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TheUnseenUnveiled@reddit

Plasma used not to support nVidia drivers with Wayland like a year ago. I'm not even sure if it does now.

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alou-S@reddit

This was wayyyyyy more than a year ago and it was a pretty short thing. And this was probably like a temporary thing between EGL and then nvidia supporting GBM. This was back in the nvidia egl-wayland days.

And no back in the egl wayland days only plasma and gnome really did support egl. Plasma removed the egl backend which I guess effects the 470xx series driver users cause they never got GBM ig?

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TheUnseenUnveiled@reddit

You're right, but it was actually 2-3y ago.

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Farados55@reddit

So what ended up happening? Plasma implemented GBM support which is when things got better?

Someone should write the history on this. It's always interesting hearing how software vendors change stuff.

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alou-S@reddit

No IIRC GBM was the standard. nvidia had something up their ass and didnt want to follow gbm so rather created their own thing called egl.

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Farados55@reddit

If you find one I would love it.

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altermeetax@reddit

And it also wasn't a Plasma-specific problem, once Nvidia started working with Wayland, it started working everywhere.

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altermeetax@reddit

It does (and it also did a year ago, I've been using it for about 2 years)

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murten101@reddit

Isn't bazzite the new shiny gaming distro?

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Farados55@reddit

Never heard of it. I'm kind of skeptical of something like that though. I'd rather go with battle-tested and reliable than something advertised to be just for gaming. WoW and rocket league work perfectly fine on Fedora.

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murten101@reddit

Idk, I'm also not really interested in gaming distros either. I don't game as much as I used to and mostly use my computer for development.

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that_one_wierd_guy@reddit

depends on the age of the card though.

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ResearchingStories@reddit

This. Literally I tried on an older Nvidia card with fedora workstation 2 days ago, and it installed, but everything froze on login.

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Farados55@reddit

Yeah the fedora drivers page has a bunch of caveats on the older architectures and if you have integrated graphics as well. I’m on a 1660 super and no major problems.

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Antobart__1@reddit

Using pop_os with 5070, working flawlessly

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oldlinuxguy@reddit

I've been using Nvidia cards for 20+ years on Linux without issue.

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rustvscpp@reddit

Will I've been using them for 20+ years with tons of issues. It's true you can install their proprietary driver with some pain and have it mostly work. But I have long since switched over to AMD since they work out of the box with open source drivers.

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werjake@reddit

In case you ever switch GPUs? I don't get the reason for the question.

It depends on the distro, the gpu (how old it is - newer ones have better support) and how much trouble you want to go through.

Some distros package a 'software app' that can make it easier. Or you can do it the 'hard way' - with CLI - but, it's usually not too bad nowadays. If you want something 'beta' - then you go through more trouble, I guess?

Some distros provide a 'custom-easy' method - such as Pop OS and Ubuntu.

Whereas distros like Fedora and OpenSUSE stick to the more 'FOSS' system so you need to either enable repos and then install various packages - modules etc. - to get things working. Some other distros will 'offer Nvidia' installs which will 'prepare' the install for nvidia graphics hardware.

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FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit

They were never bad. Linux devs became toxic toward NVidia and moved to to box them out. From Linus blocking access to kernel internals to Wayland choosing to use methods that excluded NVidia, we the Linux community, bullied NVidia over their driver licensing. NVidia has had to play catch up ever since. To be honest, we're damn lucky NVidia didn't tell us to go fly a kite and drop Linux support.

So the question isn't how bad are Nvidia drivers, it's has NVidia finished compensating and capitulating to what we did to them yet? Seriously, I REALLY want NVidia to sue Linus and the Wayland team over the BS we did to them.

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georgehank2nd@reddit

So you love N idia and would probably worship Jen-Hsun Huang's leather jacket as a relic if given the chance… and/or you have no idea what actual happened and happens in kernel-land.

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StatementOwn4896@reddit

Just to offer another perspective, Nvidia has quite the extensive enterprise support for guest VMs that utilize vGPU configuration in VMware but it feels like pulling teeth trying to get the vGPU firmware to dance with the guest VMs when there shared with other VMs using different OS types. Idk anyone here have a different experience?

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daemonpenguin@reddit

Been fine for me for the past 20 years. Installing NVIDIA drivers is as easy as installing any other package or driver. It's usually automatic, but if not you can grab the latest driver from whichever package or hardware manager your distro has.

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bootlegSkynet@reddit

I know better than to buy anything with Nvidia. I not a fu$k around and find out person anymore.

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Crash_Logger@reddit

My 1060 only works with version 550. Nothing older or newer works.

Changing between wayland and X11 or vice versa means it forgets what display is which.

It works fine once I re-co figure the 550 driver and the display settings though!

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FLCo3122@reddit

Not bad at all. For Fedora KDE using Wayland, I only had to put in 5ish commands and sign it (via a tutorial on YouTube) and they have been working great. I know people say NVIDIA suffers a 30% hit, so I probably will go with AMD next time around, but for now NVIDIA is working just fine. I do hope that NVIDIA supports Linux fully, but we can only hope for now.

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Javelina_Jolie@reddit

If you're gonna use GNOME or Plasma, you'll be OK. If you use swaywm or other compositors based on wlroots, you're in for an adventure.

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dgm9704@reddit

swaywm has worked fine with linux for some time now

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mdbluelily@reddit

My Nvidia 5070 Ti didn't like Ubuntu and Gnome, too many problems, flickering and whatnot. It works nicely on Fedora 42 - KDE and Wayland though. It's a dev machine. I haven't played games on it yet. I have installed the akmods-nvidia-driver. I have it documented if you needed it.

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ABotelho23@reddit

Do whatever you can to avoid Nvidia GPUs on Linux.

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Outrageous_Trade_303@reddit

They aren't bad at all. You are missing out that you don't have one.

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underdoeg@reddit

Can only speak for a desktop computer running arch linux. The only issue I sometimes have is suspension. Often my machine will not wake up again. Other than that I don't know of any problems on wayland or X11 (anymore). Installation is just like any other package, plus you might have to set some boot parameters.

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Farados55@reddit

I’ve been having a similar with waking from sleep. It’s hard for it to wake or when it wakes it’s really laggy. I’m on Fedora with NVIDIA drivers.

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ropid@reddit

You'll want to use a distro that has a package for the drivers in their normal repositories. It's then not a problem, installing the drivers will be easy and they will survive kernel package updates fine.

I'd check the documentation of the distro you want to try for a guide on how to use it with Nvidia, maybe something will feel weird there for you while you read it.

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cuentaparathrow123@reddit

I am a bit lost with them tbh! Trying to do a fresh Arch install in my laptop but between the integrated graphics of the intel cpu, and the nvidia 3060(laptop) I am not sure how to make it work.

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Modern_Doshin@reddit

I've had no issues. My 1050ti and 4070 ran nearly flawlessly on mint mate.

The people that parrot that nvidia is trash on linux haven't used a distro since 2010. Nvidia and Amd are almost neck and neck nowadays

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Schlart1@reddit

I had problems with LVM encryption and proprietary drivers. Other than that they work great

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penguin_horde@reddit

Terrible

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altermeetax@reddit

Installing Nvidia drivers is extremely easy. The issue isn't installing them, it's that they still have several issues and unsupported features.

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theallwaystnt@reddit

I had zero problems setting up arch, kde using wayland, and my 3090. Although I've never owned an AMD gpu to know how much more/less easy it is in comparison.

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LukeStargaze@reddit

If your graphics card is Turing+ then it is a smooth experience. I haven't experienced issues since driver 555 on Wayland.

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DogOnABike@reddit

I'm using an Nvidia GPU with Garuda. I've had zero issues.

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adamkex@reddit

Pascal (GTX 10xx) isn't great

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MattyGWS@reddit

Last I tried it was a couple years ago on fedora during the big transition from x11 to wayland and it was so bad that I gave my 3090 away to my brother and used a 6950xt instead.

Gaming performance was ok, I mean games would run just not as well as windows, workstation wise it was excellent for renders… desktop experience? No, trash. Unusable.

My AMD card; gaming performance is great, desktop experience is great. Workstation wise not amazing, low performance compared to nvidia for rendering… what eh I have a work pc for that stuff anyway so I don’t often use my personal desktop for it other than learning so it’s fine.

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OogalaBoogala@reddit

It really depends on the distro. A few come with drivers preconfigured and installed (Pop_OS, Endeavour, Bazzite, to name a few), this is the easiest option for new users. However many other distros will require you to install the drivers via their package manager, which can be more tricky (you probably need to add the Nvidia package list for one). Sometimes (depending on the distro) Nvidia drivers might not get as frequent updates, so you might be running a little slower, or with older features. For new users, this isn’t a great experience.

But once everything is installed? Everything just works.

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Obnomus@reddit

Tbh it's not that hard bro, some distro comes with pre-installed nvidia driver and for other there instruction.

Install proprietary nvidia drivers if you want performance, install you kernel headers for ex if you're running linux kernel then install linux-headers and if you're using linux-lts then install linux-lts-headers that's it. And if you don't wanna do that you got pretty good script nvidia-all.

Pro tip use environment varibale and for you games and for windows managers or desktop environment.

And here is a tool for gpu overclocking, fan control and much more Lact

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0riginal-Syn@reddit

Much better than they were a few years ago. I still prefer AMD, but have both and Nvidia works well. KDE and Gnome both work well with Nvidia. It will depend on the distro on the steps to set them up, but none of the major distros are that difficult now days.

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froschdings@reddit

It's usually not that hard installing the prorietary nvidia drivers. I can be annoying and I think sometimes you have to reinstall them after upgrades, but there still are the nouveau drivers, so there won't be a black screen after installation, they are just bad for gaming, because they aren't able to change much about the clocking speeds (because nvidia doesn't give them access)

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Zebra4776@reddit

They haven't been bad for over a decade.

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I_Arman@reddit

I've been using nVidia with Ubuntu since 6.06, and apart from one time when I accidentally installed the wrong version, I've never had an issue. No broken installs, no issues with screen tearing or glitching, nothing like that.

I wonder, sometimes, if the whole problem with nVidia was blown out of proportion. Sure, it's closed source drivers, and for some people that's a big problem, but I've found for the use cases I have, nVidia works better than AMD.

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stormdelta@reddit

I haven't had any major issues with them, though you need to ensure the correct kernel options are set - many distros don't do this properly by default still unfortunately.