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

[PublicNuisance]

That seems like a lot more work to get the Nvidia drivers installed than on Linux Mint. Maybe I'm misunderstanding things, I haven't used Fedora in years and even then only for a few hours.

[dungeon]

I know! I tried to include pictures where it was appropriate, but its hard with articles like this.

I would put corrupted pictures from The Talos Principle, that exactly match purpose of article with comment "I shall not allow the corruption of my garden

[Ericg]

That seems like a lot more work to get the Nvidia drivers installed than on Linux Mint. Maybe I'm misunderstanding things, I haven't used Fedora in years and even then only for a few hours.

That's because Ubuntu, and by extension Mint, ships with their Jockey utility that makes it easy to install third party drivers.

[AsuMagic]

Is it really weird that installing the NVIDIA drivers on Arch is a breeze? You don't have to do barely anything after installing it. The files are updated whenever there's a new Kernel available. Even Optimus with Bumblebee works well. In fact, it works better then with Ubuntu, since in Ubuntu you have to manually edit lots of files to make Bumblebee work.

Compared to my Kubuntu setup, yes, this was much simpler to install on Arch.
pacman -Syu nvidia.
The settings panel is one package away. Want to build a custom kernel? Install nvidia-dkms instead.

[VikingGe]

Honestly I don't quite get what the fuss about installing the Nvidia driver on Fedora is about. Even on Arch it boils down to installing the nvidia package, can't be that hard for them to make a package which sets up things automatically.

Anyway, I went with the RX 480, and upon reading that you can't even properly run a desktop without relying on the Nvidia blobs, I'm quite glad I did.

[dungeon]

I would put corrupted pictures from The Talos Principle, that exactly match purpose of article with comment "I shall not allow the corruption of my garden

Ha, ha, this is even better and very symbolic

[bug77]

According to the Fedora project, Fedora is a great distro for everyone.

And if I disagree, I'm a "liar" by your standards.

Well, if you ignore the fact that Fedora is basically a test bed for RHEL which is anything but a user friendly desktop, all sorts of possibilities open up
Fedora is nice, it's a good distro if you need recent packages, but can't accommodate a rolling distro (e.g. you're using it at work). It also stands clear of anything proprietary, which, depending on your needs, can be either a boon or a curse.

[Danny3]

lol, are you implying the amd open source drivers are outperforming nvidia's proprietary drivers?

No, I'm saying that I don't care anymore so much about the performance in games, where the proprietary driver is very good.
I care more about the performance of open source drivers where I'm impressed by AMD.

[sheldonl]

Personally, I'd tweak the conclusion a little to say this:
AMD - Will be a great choice and investment, possibly will be a better choice than Nvidia (regardless of price) but currently isn't there yet. Waiting is a requirement, and it seems you're better off getting a GCN 1.2 or newer GPU if you want a GPU with sufficient developer attention. I'm guessing AMD will end up being a very solid choice in maybe 1 or 2 years. In 3 years, it'll probably be better than Nvidia, or at least the Linux experience will be better than Windows.
Nvidia - Pay more for a [mostly] feature-complete experience with par performance. Currently the best choice if you expect the most compatibility and performance with new games.

About 8 years ago I was at a crossroads for video cards, AMD or NVidia, and I remember asking for opinions on a forum similar to this and got the same answer you posted above. That should be pause for reflection. In the last 8 years AMD cards are still in the same situation. Granted, they have made strides, but if you are looking to game on Linux NVIDIA is still the best solution now and for the foreseeable future. AMD could still take years to come to parity. You'd only choose AMD for more ideological reasons.

[andrebrait]

Honestly I don't quite get what the fuss about installing the Nvidia driver on Fedora is about. Even on Arch it boils down to installing the nvidia package, can't be that hard for them to make a package which sets up things automatically.

Anyway, I went with the RX 480, and upon reading that you can't even properly run a desktop without relying on the Nvidia blobs, I'm quite glad I did.

Your "even on arch" quote is somewhat wrong. Many things on Arch are more straightforward than on Fedora and the NVIDIA drivers are one of those things.

I tried Fedora 24 some time ago. The only way to get Optimus working was with Bumblebee and even then, I couldn't install CUDA, for instance, because it depended on a different driver version, which was not available in a way that could be used with Optimus. I eventually succeeded, but I ended up with a weird mix of two NVIDIA driver versions and CUDA packages from NVIDIA's FC23 repository. On Arch, 'pacman -S nvidia cuda' would had got it working in no time. Seriously, since Arch is a rolling release distro, they end up packaging things in much more clever and simpler ways than most mainstream distros out there. Also, not having to resort to 3rd party repositories is nice.

Also, Fedora didn't set up TRIM in any way for my SSDs, which Ubuntu and even Antergos do.