NVIDIA 381.09 Linux Beta Driver Released: New Kernel Support, Updated Vulkan

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Well, I hope this fixes issues I'm having with PRIME on a friends laptop. Everything works until I switch to the Intel GPU, and then try to switch back to the Nvidia GPU. After that the computer will no longer boot and I have to go into recovery mode and purge the Nvidia drivers. If I can't figure out how to get it to work in the next day or so I'm going to have to give up and reinstall Windows 10, which is really going to make me look bad since I finally convinced them to switch to Linux

After all my prodding, and showing them games running under Wine, they were so impressed they were willing to give it a try, and I'm really surprised that so far the Intel/Nvidia GPU combination doesn't work at all. The hybrid system is a really good power saving idea for laptops. Oh well. At least it makes me feel a little better about my AMD driver problems. I was going to go out and get an Nvidia card but I guess right now nothing is working correctly.

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Try some older driver version (in year 2016) from the archive.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-amd64-display-archive.html

Thank you for your help, I was finally able to get the driver to work. However I then unfortunately discovered that all Nvidia drivers have a screen tearing problem that renders them useless, and the problem is known and has no remedy. So unfortunately not only was my friends patience at an end, but I also had to admit that Linux simply wasn't a viable alternative at this time. It's really a shame that the Linux video driver infrastructure was destroyed before a viable replacement was ready. For now I'm going to have to stop trying to convert friends and clients from Windows to Linux because neither Nvidia or AMD have drivers suitable for end users. Hopefully things will be different in a few years and I can begin the drive again.

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It is easier to maintain a Linux computer than a win virushoover computer. In linux you have clear log file system. In win virus hoover you have black and blue screens and it takes hours to solve problems that is already solved in Debian like software dependency problems. Desktop tearing can be caused by the desktop, I use desktop compositing with Xfce to prevent window tearing when moving a window fast. The Nvidia linux driver does have many xorg options that you can try. It only takes a bit time to learn new things that same you had when you started using win virus hoover.

A friend of my kid has a laptop with 970M and it is working fine with Solus Linux. I am sure that If I bought a laptop with A12-9700P, Amd open source drivers would work well. In a desktop computer there is no problems using Amd open source driver or Nv closed source driver. Only that it is easier to use the open source driver, it might work out of the box. My wife uses the Nouveau driver with GT8400 and my kid plays Steam games with Debian testing Xfce and GTX750ti. My kid fed up using win7 and win10.

I've been running Linux since the mid 1990s off and on, and currently use Xubuntu 16.04 as my primary desktop. I'm also a hardware/firmware/software designer with over three decades of experience, most of that as an embedded systems engineer. I'm intimately familiar with Linux and appreciate both its strengths and its weaknesses, and am honest about both. In fact I had incredible difficulty even getting my very expensive Sapphire R9 390 to work, and was only able to do so by specifically using kernel 4.9 with patched AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 drivers. Nothing else provides the OpenGL 4.5 compatibility mode I need, and any drivers after 16.50 cause complete graphics corruption when playing games.

The laptop in question was a Core I5 system with a discrete 940M GPU using PRIME. The screen tearing problems are well known and considered unfixable at this time, but I spent three days trying anyway just on that problem, and six days on the computer in total. However I found there was indeed no cure and the owner of the laptop needed his brand new computer, so I had to put Windows 10 back on it even though I despise Windows. And yes, I was running Xubuntu which is the XFCE desktop version of Ubuntu.

The unfortunate truth is that manufacturers and the Linux development community made an egregious error by abandoning the previous driver architecture and infrastructure before a new one was ready. Of course replacing X and the overall driver architecture is essential and necessary, resources are limited, and it may be that there was no other recourse. However it's not clear to me that it was, but it is what it is.

What's especially regrettable is that the previous driver architecture was abandoned at a time when Linux had one of the best chances to advance on the desktop in its history. People were disenchanted with Windows 10, and Steam was making a very public effort with Steam Machines to push Linux as had never been done before. But as it stands now Steam Machines have failed and Linux on the desktop is stagnating again, though hopefully it will still get up to 3% of the desktop market this year.

These are the simple facts, stripped of as much emotion as possible, and it does no one any good to deny or hide from them. I am confident that Linux will one day reign supreme in the desktop market just as Android does the mobile market because it is technically superior to Windows, and Apple is too expensive with an ecosystem that is sparse, locked down, and cloistered. In fact Windows 10 is such a behemothly slow and inefficient botnet that when I showed my friend his laptop running it he was greatly disappointed at how slow it was compared to Linux. But the bottom line was he needed to play his games, he's invested a considerable amount of money in them, and that just wasn't possible with Linux at this time.

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The open source OpenGL core profile is 4.5, the compatibility profile is 3.3, and unfortunately there are no plans to change it. Many games and programs look at the compatibility profile, for example Steam itself, and one of the current game favorites No Man's Sky. There are environment variables you can set for the open source drivers to make them claim OpenGL 4.5 compatibility mode, but they've never made them work for anything I've tried.

As for your comment about Xubuntu XFCE, it's XFCE. I use the distro with the most support because others have proven to be no better, and in the end have equivalent levels of problems.

And though I prefer desktops, many people use their laptops for gaming. That's just the way it is. Urging them to get desktops so they can run Linux is not going to advance Linux adoption.

I'm glad the systems and people you've encountered don't have problems with Linux. However I offer free Linux installation and setup for anyone who asks, and about half can't run it because they do have problems. There are a few that just don't like it, but I have a custom XFCE theme that's quite beautiful, and my own custom script called Wine Manager that enables the installation of unlimited bottles with clean, organized, hierarchical menus and custom environments so "just not liking it" usually isn't a problem.

By the way, I of course know about PlayOnLinux but I've found it to be a mess, and my script works much better. It's nowhere near as easy though, and you need to know how to patch, compile, and install various wine versions and set up custom environment variables.

I've invested quite a bit of time and effort over the years trying to switch people from Windows to Linux, but have to hold off for those who require gaming now because over the last year it's simply been too much time wasted, primarily because of the current video driver disarray. I understand that you disagree, and that's fine. However reality is reality, and it doesn't change simply because we wish it to be different, or think everyone should adopt some different way of doing things. If we are to advance Linux on the desktop it needs to work within that reality because the vast base of Windows users are not going to change their systems and practices just for us.

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The video you posted is from a year ago, and No Man's Sky did work perfectly then. Unfortunately the game has since changed to require OpenGL 4.5 compatibility mode and doesn't work without it now, so the open source drivers no longer work.

And you won't see any errors in Steam as it doesn't require OpenGL 4.5 compatibility mode. I was just pointing out that Steam looks at the compatibility profile, not the core profile.

By the way I'm talking about Steam under wine, and I use the latest wine staging with special patches to make it work even better than the pre-packaged version. If you look up Arch Linux wine staging you can find the patches I'm talking about and use the PKGBUILD file as a template for using them under Ubuntu.

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Oibaf ppa has Gallium Nine. Tomb Raider 2013 benchmark runs slower with Nine than CSMT.

Yes, I don't use the Nine patches. I use the heap allocation, wbemprox, and steam patches. The heap allocation patch is especially important because it prevents the thread locking problem on some programs. For example it allows me to run DVDFab 10 under wine. Without it DVDFab hangs after backing up a disk and corrupts the output.

And by the way, I'm not really much of a gamer. I primarily invest time in getting games to work so I can convince people to move from Windows to Linux. In my experience it's one of the major reasons both kids and adults don't use it. However I have about 20 games myself, most of them pretty old, and do try to make sure they work just so I don't feel like I wasted my money

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DVD ripping is so simple task that many Linux tools exists. I know that people are like my 14 year old kid, I needed to install win10 for costly adobe video editor just when the kid had learned to use Kdenlive in Debian. Just because they use adobe shit in the school to waste tax payers money.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/dvdbackup

https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux...-software.html

Oh yes, DVD ripping is no problem with open source tools. However, Blu-ray ripping is not. I use two tools for that, DVDFab and MakeMKV. MakeMKV can actually be used for free right now by the way, but I paid $50 for a license key anyway to support their work. There are problems right now with MakeMKV, for example it can't rip all Blu-rays and it sometimes has difficulty identifying tracks correctly so you have to use some trial and error to find what you want. But it's the only tool I've found that rips multi-channel PCM tracks correctly.

After that I use the awesome open source Handbrake and MKVToolNix programs for compression and disk editing. I've never found anything, open or closed source, that works better than those.

By the way, a side benefit of MakeMKV is that it has a library that can be used with VLC so it plays Blu-rays, complete with menu navigation and everything. Here's all you have to do with Ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:heyarje/makemkv-beta
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install makemkv-oss makemkv-bin

sudo apt-get install vlc libbluray-bdj libbluray1
sudo apt-get remove libaacs0
sudo apt-get remove libbdplus0

cd /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
sudo ln -s libmmbd.so.0 libaacs.so.0
sudo ln -s libmmbd.so.0 libbdplus.so.0

And viola! You have a Linux Blu-ray player! Since it's in beta you can get a free key at this time for MakeMKV from https://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1053. You have to update the free key every month but if you don't have the $50 for a permanent one it's well worth it.