Editorial: Using NVIDIA On Linux For The First Time In 10 Years

[Hi-Angel]

Well, what I like in AMD is that they use Gallium, and I can use wine-nine just fine.

Btw, that seems to be a nice idea for AMD — they could develop gallium-nine themselves, providing a killer feature.

[DanL]

Open source in the sense that you can read the source code. Not much else. It's mostly done by paid professionals

Some of those paid professionals were once amateur hackers until they contributed to the code base and AMD hired them.

[cj.wijtmans]

The difficulty level for installing the driver really depends on the distro.

It's kind of sad that Fedora doesn't have a mechanism to make this easy like Ubuntu does. But then again Fedora isn't really intended to be a consumer-type desktop distro.

I was going to say this, on gentoo and mint(ubuntu based i think) its extremely easy.

[R00KIE]

Personally I'd say "Just works and works well" is the killer feature, the rest are bonuses. Not having to recompile kernel modules and having to worry if a kernel update will break graphics is a major win and you only give it credit after you have to deal with a system where things need extra work to setup.

In my experience so far the just works part is there, but there are still some rough edges that need to be takes care of before we get to the works well part. I suppose not all rough edges can be blamed on AMD, as card/laptop/system builders can most probably do changes that will break things, but it is AMD that takes the blame, people don't say my AMD card in system/laptop xyz doesn't work as it should, people say this has an AMD card and it doesn't work well.

[TumultuousUnicorn]

Thank you for your feedback, Eric.
Maybe the problem is Fedora, let me give you an example: on Arch Linux, the NVIDIA proprietary driver is packaged in official repo, contrary to AMD driver. So, yon only need to install both nvidia and lib32-nvidia-libgl packages (and lib32-nvidia-libgl from [multilib] repo if you want to play to 32-bit games on x86_64).

But yes, gaming with NVIDIA proprietary driver seems better than gaming with AMD proprietary driver. AMDGPU PRO is not a mature driver.

[TingPing]

The difficulty level for installing the driver really depends on the distro.

It's kind of sad that Fedora doesn't have a mechanism to make this easy like Ubuntu does. But then again Fedora isn't really intended to be a consumer-type desktop distro.

Fedora is a fine "consumer distro". In Fedora 25 you can install the Nvidia driver from Gnome Software: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2016/...orkstation-25/

[Danny3]

It seems my situation is exactly the opposite
I think I'm Using NVIDIA On Linux or Windows For The Last Time In 10 Years.
I'm tired of these assholes and I care about security and privacy more than performance.
I'm impressed by the advancements of open source AMD driver and I'm definitely gonna buy graphic cards from them in the future.
I

[birdie]

The difficulty level for installing the driver really depends on the distro.

It's kind of sad that Fedora doesn't have a mechanism to make this easy like Ubuntu does. But then again Fedora isn't really intended to be a consumer-type desktop distro.

Well, that's one big lie:

MYTH - Fedora is not suitable for everyday desktop users
FACT - Fedora is packed with features that make computing easy, secure, and enjoyable for everyone.

Then this thread has so many raving Linux/Open Source zealots, that's my last post here.

[mikus]

I've used amd video since at least 2009, mostly because then is when I first used more than 2 displays (4 then, and later 6 total), which nvidia never supported largely anything more than 2 displays. Not only did amd work in doing so, they produced cards with up to 6 outputs, of which I used. Nvidia finally began making cards to use 3-4 outputs within the past few years, and still to my knowledge do not have more than 4 ports on a card.

AMD graphics were always terribly buggy with catalyst, but only until recently with upgrading to 16.04 found the oss drivers mature enough to actually use, and game with. Then the problem was less the video card, and more kde, which is still a basketcase for multi-monitor support. Eventually I needed a video upgrade from my 6x 1080p to instead 3x 4k/2160p sets, that just seemed to be stretching my 7970 card's life.

Seeing I now need only 3 outputs, I went with an nvidia 1070 with rave reviews here and elsewhere generally, but so far, nothing about it has been smooth under ubuntu. To fix some of the multi-monitor issues with KDE, I use their bleeding edge Neon repos for latest plasma builds, and where the same install of ubuntu/neon worked fine under amd, it's been entirely broken, again.

With nvidia, which I am not sure why everything from grub splash breaking to kde breaking enough to crash me daily over it aside from something odd with the binary drivers complicating it differently. This was with my existing install of ubuntu, and a clean install of KDE Neon from their installer, both were broken in the same bad ways.

Even things like Arch require me to modify grub booting to do "nomodeset" if I actually expect any vesa video out of the outputs from cdrom boot with this nvidia. No bueno.

The joys of closed, proprietary vendors and their firmwares (or lack there of).

[GreatEmerald]

Fwiw, ericg, you picked probably the worst combo. On Ubuntu for example, not only installing the Nvidia drivers perfectly painless (sudo apt-get install nvidia-current), there's actually a GUI for installing any proprietary driver your system may be needing. Just sayin'.

No, it's not the worst combo. openSUSE Tumbleweed is worse. It's pretty much what Ericg described, except kernels get updated at least once a week. This week the kernel got updated 3 times.

It's also my favourite distro, I'm using it on my main Pc and I have an NVIDIA card. Yeah...