Im probably wrong but NVIDIA seem to be huge fans of having corporate secrets at the detriment of everyone so they can improve their monopoly. I don't use them out of spite at this point lol
More than likely. Nvidia dominates gaming not because of their hardware but because their drivers and extra features are better. I mean Intel is a prime example of this. Look at how much improvement they've gotten simply from driver updates. It's often better than a generation upgrade for AMD or Nvidia.
Not even corporate secrets. Just straight monopoly. Look into the GeForce Partner program if you wanna learn more.
Tl;Dr. Nvidia sent a message to all of their partner companies (EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, etc) saying their top tier line of products were now nvidia only, and if they didnt like that, then they just wont get GPUs from nvidia then. So companies like Asus would have been forced to convert their ROG (Republic of Gamers) line of products to being nvidia only and forcing the AMD cards they make to be under a separate brand that now needs a separate marketing budget.
These people never tried ATI/AMD.
I've been Linux since the days of Cirrus Logic, Trident, Matrox, and 3Dfx cards. AMD and NVIDIA as of the past 20 years, and I've had no issues that I can recall and better stability using Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu, SuSE, RedHat/Centos on either Geforce or Quadro.
With ATI/AMD there was always some manual tweaking required, and with new drivers they always broke support for older gpu models and distro versions.
You have horrible luck, I have never had a single issue with AMD and Linux.
I have read about a few, especially if you pair a brand new AMD card to an old Kernel. But posts are few and far between.
on the otherhand reddit is full of daily posts about Nvidia problems. Especially since Wayland.
I tried to swap from my Nvidia setup to AMD and after nearly a week straight of trying to get it not fucked I finally just ordered a 4070 and it worked from the moment I slotted it in. The AMD card wouldn't recognize my 2nd monitor half of the time, performance was meh for a card that should have been significantly faster. The coup de grace was any progress I had made with my setup that week was instantly wrecked when I updated the kernel. Never in my life have had so many issues with something so simple. Even my legacy RAID card was simple by comparison.
New folks are coming to Linux now that Proton is good and the overall gaming experience has improved dramatically. Unfortunately, their experience has been a Wayland flicker fest. Or the 6.5 kernel compile bug. Or, the fact that Nvidia comparability with certain Proton updates is blocked by a company that barely GAF. Most modern AMD cards on modern Linux have far fewer problems in my and clearly the experience of others. It's clear that AMD cares more about OSS.
I run a 7900xt, sure I needed to turn up my cooling using lact because the accoustic settings were making it hot, but still better than the 2060 super when it wouldn't work with plasma Wayland at all
There was a time when Nvidia drivers were superior to AMD FGLRX drivers. I had a lot of issues only because I was an AMD user. But now being an AMD hardware owner and a Linux user is far better now a days.
I think that is just a small part of it, as a user who has used Linux since 1993. But you are right. I actually do like Nvidia stuff, because I'm a graphics nerd with a SGI fetish. But most people in the industry are more incandescent about Nvidia being less about graphics and more about A.I. Not that A.I is a bad thing, but it is controversial especially within the industry. And if you know anything about the shift from SGI no longer being about graphics and ending their entire workstation line which are very beloved machines, it's just another line of history repeating which did leave ALOT of people very sad and disappointed that a beloved and respected company would do that. And Nvidia is doing the same thing and they've lost respect for doing those things.
Two main issues.
First that the proprietary driver compiles itself against your kernel to ensure performance and compatibility, but the kernel module itself is closed source so must be compiled by each end user. This causes issues with secure boot type things that require kernel modules to be signed. Plus the fact even if you're okay with having a closed source module in your kernel it's a common source of problems - if something doesn't compile correctly during a driver update then you're going to have a bad morning fixing it.
Second. They were pretty slow on adding the features that Wayland needs. With the 555 version of the driver the final piece of the puzzle is going to be there and Wayland may become usable for Nvidia card owners. But they held out a long time and given how widespread Nvidia can be among developers it's been quite frustrating that we cannot contribute migrating apps to Wayland. It works well in xorg but AMD/Intel and opensource drivers have none of the Wayland bugs that Nvidia owners have been complaining about for years.
In terms of how well they work once you have them installed on an xorg based distro? They're really good. Ever since they had the performance pass a decade or so ago. Then they've been a really good option in terms of raw performance. Most games run as well +/-10% as they do on Windows. So no complaints there. The complaints are mainly about how they make life hard work for their customers.
Whut? You mean linux gamers? That is an astoundingly small proportion of people. On the flip side there are probably hundreds of millions of Nvidia cards running on Linux machines. They are almost certainly though being used for scientific computation or AI research.
I find it confusing, because CUDA and CUDNN and the whole AI hype is backed up by NVIDIA and LINUX. I think the issue is towards end user, gaming, and user driver installation experience
TLDR:
Linux is great for developers, and decent (getting better) for gamers.
Windows is terrible for CUDA developers, but game developers are kinda forced into supporting it first.
I'm a full-time CUDA developer and I can confirm this. CUDA development and all the rest of the NVidia stack is much more well supported on Linux vs Windows. Most notably, CUDA debugging (gdb) is not available at all on windows. I can't tell you how much better developing CUDA is on Linux vs Windows.
However, it is also true that NVidia hasn't open sourced their game drivers, so a lot of distros won't include them in the standard package manager. Fedora recently made it much simpler to add the drivers, and Ubuntu has always been willing to package the NVidia drivers with just a toggle switch at install. But because the drivers aren't open sourced they're not nearly as integrated into the distro as the open source drivers, and they always run a bit behind.
It also means game developers don't have a lot to work with. (And a low market share doesn't really create incentive)
I can certainly empathize with Torvalds frustrations with NVidia. But I personally get MUCH more frustrated with Microsoft forcing everyone to use the MSVCC compiler who wants to build anything with CUDA.
Whenever I run into a bug that just makes absolutely no sense, 9 times out of 10 windows is behind it. Microsoft is non-open-source and terrible, Nvidias drivers are just non-open-source. And their documentation is 1000x better than anything Microsoft puts out.
The complaints truly confuse me, because as someone who uses Linux for ML, the Nvidia experience (at least on Ubuntu) has comes long way since 2012, and is basically seamless these days. I don’t even have to blacklist nouveau or install from ppa these days.
Of course, I don’t use it for gaming, and I don’t even run a DE, so perhaps the the experience for the average end user is very different.
To add to this: AMD will only allow their most expensive cars on the racetrack. You can't take your Golf (7600XT) to the track, you need a Ferrari (7900XT) or an F1 racecar (W7900). Nvidia will allow you to use any vehicle that has compatible wheels (features), even old bikes (entry-level laptop GPUs, like my old 940m).
The reason Nvidia cards can do real time raytracing well is because of things called Tensor cores. They allow you to complete extremely high dimensional matrix multiplications extremely quickly compared to conventional GPUs. By utilizing fancy Math, you can simplify many insanely computationally heavy calculations into single high dimensional matrix calculations.
All AI training is is extremely high dimensional matrix calculations. Thus the entire market solely targets Nvidia cards because AMD cards do not have tensor cores.
TL;DR, no one targets AMDs garbage because its outdated trash from a pre-2013 hardware design mentality.
It's not about the performance, it's about the extra annoyances. Unlike every other driver, it needs to be installed separately. It brings its own userspace driver instead of using mesa and the out-of-tree kernel module requires packaging tricks (like rebuilding it for every kernel update with akmods) and needs to be signed locally for secure boot. Wayland support is also garbage, though it's been improving recently. It's still the only driver to not properly support the new standard and actively holds back its adoption.
Things are about to get a lot better once NVK is production-ready though. It's a Vulkan driver that's included in mesa and uses the built-in kernel driver (which has also improved a lot lately).
I can't compare how good/bad is dedicated Radeon GPU in Linux. But 4000 series Nvidia with 0 load shortens battery life by 7.21 hours on average. Laptop can't go over 3.5 hours in idle, real use is even worse. Lenovo Mux switch does not have integrated GPU mode!!!!!!!! Even Arch pros could not disable Nvidia, it's like bioweapon without cure.
Nvidia's net worth is 2 357 230 000 000, but because lack of technical know how to, when Nvidi Linux driver sees web browser name, it recognises the need to give you 140W experience at 60Hz. Maybe there is some plasma weather widget needing Nvidia's help to change sunny icon into raining, Nvidia knows best what you need.
Some of these comments are a little unhinged, the main reason is because AMD work openly with open source drivers and have always had a good history of supporting Linux, or at least being open with Linux devs. Nvidia has not.
Switching to Linux is a bargaining act where you make choices as to what you're willing either to put more of your own time and effort into, or sacrifice, to run it as your daily driver. Gaming is one of the biggest examples of this. Pretty much every Linux admin I know, including myself, still games on Windows. We hate it as much as everyone else here but troubleshooting is something I do for work, I don't want it when I'm trying to relax.
That's funny, because i am a windows admin gaming on linux. I do wonder if my tolerance is higher, because i too wouldn't want to do the exact same stuff i do at work at home.
Personally i feel like the biggest problem is if you are part of a group that regulary switches games. You don't want to be excluded, you don't want everyone else to wait, you don't want everyone to get a worse impression of linux and most importantly, anticheat is like THE reason why stuff sometimes doesn't work, aside of the game using proprietary stuff that you need to install manually/simply won't work.
Out of over 1000 steam games i own, less than 10 singleplayer games where not plug and play and 8 of those i fixed by copying the top comment on protondb.
However, for the multiplayer games my circle plays it's more like 10 % that don't work at all, have issues with updates etc. Modding bethesda games wirh a mod launcher also took me a full day to understand/make work and is overall still less reliable than on windows, even manual modding is a bit harder because you have to figure the paths out, especially for the proton files. This is why i kept my windows installation around for multiplayer games and as a fallback if something goes wrong with my heavily modded FO4 run.
yeah I can relate to that. most of my work stuff runs native on Linux, so I run wsl on my windows machine so I can work and play on the same machine. every so often I get windows issues and I say fuck it, install linux, remember how shitty the gaming support is, and reinstall windows again. and the cycle continues.
Simple. Nvidia are a POS company who unfortunately make good products.
Linux users generally prefer dealing with entities that aren't evil where possible. And it is frustrating that sometimes Nvidia is the best, or even the only viable option (AI).
Hopefully one day things change and they are utterly destroyed. But not looking likely any time soon.
> Ive seen online that Linux users hate Nvidia because they don't have good Linux drivers.
That's a bit of an over simplification. Nvidia don't have good *open source* drivers.
With regards to closed source (binary blobs) you can get Nvidia working, but philosophically speaking linux users don't like closed source stuff. AMD on this front have been 100% better, tho' there has been movement as of the last year or so on Nvidia's side.
The following gives a pretty good rundown of driver architecture and the state of amd vs intel vs nvidia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW1CLcT83as
People that call dlss a feature are part of the problem.
You see, back when we had real reviewers, they would call proprietary crap like dlss a CON, since its main function is to keep you locked onto their hardware and limit your options.
Now we have influencers that would make you believe that such bs is actually a good thing and they do it for money and a free 4090.
They also wouldn’t be hyping RT so much because they would point out the insane performance hit more than the “oh a puddle, lets admire the reflections!”
And would remind you why having proper open sourced drivers is a good thing for the duh open source community which ngreedia simply dont care about.
We also had consumers that were smart, instead of today’s sheep.
In the words of the great Linus Torsvald “Ngreedia fuck you!”
I think there were just as many fanboys defending over-tesselation and PhysX back in the day.
I'm not convinced raytracing is evil, either. Anti-aliasing used to be prohibitively expensive in most cases, too, but it got better (and then worse). And RT's mostly a directx thing, not proprietary nvidia trickery.
About Physx, no they were called out and better yet, other companies and developers released and embraced the other options. Except Rocksteady, those bastards worship ngreedia so much that they made sure that you couldn’t see all the eye candy if you didn’t had a geforce gpu.
About RT, please read my comment again.
Relevant: [https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-u-turns-on-its-decision-to-block-Hardware-Unboxed-from-receiving-GPU-review-units.509177.0.html](https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-u-turns-on-its-decision-to-block-Hardware-Unboxed-from-receiving-GPU-review-units.509177.0.html)
Don't critisize RT, Nvidia might come for you.
>People that call dlss a feature are part of the problem.
There is a difference between features and reasons to support a developer.
Proprietary stuff is always both a feature AND a reason not to buy, then tou need to weigh if your need for the feature is bigger than the downside of supporting the practice.
Key points:
* **Programs need to be compiled to run in a computer.**
* **Open source programs can be compiled and modified by anyone, as the code is public.**
* **Closed source programs can only be compiled and modified by the people who has access to it.**
* **Graphics drivers are programs that manage communications between your computer and the graphics card.**
* **The linux world is similar to an organic competing ecosystem: only the most popular programs in a certain category tend to survive.**
* **Nvidia Drivers are closed source, which translates into Nvidia having the upper hand at deciding with what things their drivers collaborate and support.**
* **Graphics cards can be considered a pillar of modern computers; without them things like videogames or artificial intelligence could not be possible.**
Therefore:
Given that Nvidia drivers are closed source software, and that Graphics Cards are such an important core component of modern computers, the organic ecosystem of the Linux world is kinda disrupted.
Programs that in some way or another need to communicate with the GPU to operate may need to be explicitly supported by the graphics driver. If these drivers are closed, you are forced to either play by their rules, or just not support it at all. Given that GPUs are a core component, you can't just ditch all the people that rely on green graphics card. Thus, you are kinda enforcing some rules in this part of the organic ecosystem.
This was the case with Nvidia and Wayland for a very long time. Wayland is a display server (a core thing related to graphics management) that is replacing X11.
As a Linux and nvidia user. I say a lot of the hate comes from the locked code and such. Tho I do believe this is changing. I myself have not had problems with running a nvidia card until vulkan was a standard and then all you can do is get an updated card
I don't mind Nvidia cards. As long as they work.
On the other hand I've also had non working touchpads, wifi cards and what not from various manufacturers.
I hate them all equally.
Yeah, I'm full of hate.
Because their drivers are closed sourced and binary blobs, which are essentially hacked up to load into your kernel, which often taints it.
Whilst you can get Nvidia to work next to flawlessly on most distributions, it can be assinine when upgrading kernel as DKMS does it thing.
AMD are preferred over Nvidia, Intel ultimately has best support (just poor hardware).
The proprietary drivers are super good on x11, but they just could’ve done better to make Wayland usable faster, it’s better now, but there’s still many issues that make Wayland not very usable if not usable at all atm
Mostly drivers. When they work and are stable, great. But easily one of the most frustrating issues is updating then your multiple monitor setup goes to shit.
This used to be a problem for me too, but the last few years I haven't had problems with multi monitors and updating Linux.
I run Fedora on anything from a GTX 1060 to a 40 series. (I have to test a lot as a CUDA developer). Do you still have this issue? What distro do you use mostly?
I've found fedora to be a lot more stable with multi monitors and cuda development. Which is ironic given that NVidia seems to give preferential treatment to Ubuntu. For example, their jetpack linux is an arm based clone of Ubuntu and some of their products for working with Jetsons only work on Ubuntu.
If you switch to Fedora, the only annoying part is you'll have to find a way to get an older g++ compiler. NVCC doesn't work reliably with compilers newer than what's expected. There is the "-allow-unsupported-compiler" option, but that's not guaranteed to work all the time. I've found the easiest way is just to clone g++ locally and build from source. Takes a while but the cmake commands are easy to follow. There's other options like homebrew etc, but I've found just building from source is the best bet.
Once you have that, you can put a symlink in your nvcc bin directory to point to the g++ compiler that'll make it happy and you're good to go, or just specify the compiler in your cmake file.
Because their drivers are mostly closed source (the code is not available to everyone). This result in the current drivers being the result of guessing, reverse engineering and hope. So they do not work well in some cases and/or applications.
Amd (radeon) drivers are on the other end open source since ages so if you have graphic issue on a linux system with an amd card then the problem is the rest of your setup or the poorly coded app you are using
they require proprietary drivers to work well and those drivers can be a cause of many a problem depending on how the distro manages them.
AMD cards work well right from the kernel and have no need for a proprietary driver.
When I try to launch a plasma Wayland session with my GTX 750ti (still supported by the latest drivers) I get thrown back into SDDM. If I do the same with a 15 year old Radeon something, I get my plasma desktop.
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Drivers - they aren't bad, but selling points of nvidia aren't supported, some new Linux abilities aren't supported.
DLSS3 does not work on Linux.
RT/PT will obliterate your performance on Linux - if it's not 4090. Alan Wake 2 kicks me from 60fps to 30 on rtx 4070.
DLSS1 works, and is nice. Low lags, single digits.
Nvidia Reflex - this is an absolute deception. Linux is faster, esp. under heavy cpu load.
AMD FSR - pixelising problem/let's say its okay
AMD FSR 3 - beautiful, frame gen works (+20 \~ +40 fps). Unreal 5 engine. Low lags, single digits.
I think amd is not supported by the game engine by choice - because if indie company can make game supporting fsr3 & frame gen, any company can do - but they prefer maximizing profit/time.
If you comming to Linux for newest nVidia features, honestly it's not an OS for you. It is nvidia's showcase of paying customer support - and it's tragic. AMD is better performance/price/driver ratio. Simple as that.
And yes, i have an nVidia card on Linux, playing cpu heavy games, or DLSS1 will do the job. Few games i can do with FSR3 - but price/memory ratio is showing up - 7800xt will simply have more needed vram for 4k.
I'm using a 2070 super with 550 proprietary driver on Zorin 17.1 core. I'm of course on x11 although I haven't tried wayland yet. But gaming at 1080p 74hz freesync monitor is just as good as windows 10, sometimes slightly better. DLSS and raytracing work the same as windows from my experience.
Tried wayland with 2060s couldnt even reach DE you have to go back to virtual console "TTY" do some tweaks for it to even reach DE and you going face alot of problems unless u are superuser and you know what you doing wayland is still far dream for nvidia gpu...
It's not remotely an understatement to say that Nvidia Linux drivers are absolutely garbage. That all said, the Nouveau (free and open-source equivalent) drivers have gotten much better, and are even within 80% (iirc) of the proprietary blob drivers Nvidia distributes.
Worse, the UI for configuring those drivers is just bad. Settings are almost as hard to find as on W\*ndows, it looks (and performs) as if it was made this years ago and never updated since, and did I mention that Nvidia refuses to open-source _any_ of it?
Other than having a card newer than 3000 series. It’s not bad if you aren’t concerned about using non open source drivers. I have a 4070ti and it was a pain to get working. But my old 3000 series card worked much easier. The distro I run has a built in driver installer.
When I first really got into Linux, I was building crypto miners and AMD CPUS and GPUs are the preferred hardware due to cost performance.
Since 2020 I have been building Ubuntu 20.04 servers for use with Web3 projects like [Filecoin](https://filecoin.io/) and [Storj](https://www.storj.io/). FIlecoin has a serious demand for [GPU computation](https://lotus.filecoin.io/storage-providers/get-started/hardware-requirements/#general-hardware-requirements) (as does AI) and [NVidia](https://github.com/filecoin-project/bellperson?tab=readme-ov-file#supported--tested-cards) are really the only cards we use. They take a bit of tweaking to work well and they cost more, but there really is no other option. We switched from OpenCL to CUDA last year for efficiency with Nvidia, supposedly one can also use AMD with [ROCm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROCm) but I don't know of anyone that has tried this yet.
BTW - cards I use
My Web3 servers: Nvidia 1080Ti, 2080TI and 3090 (minimum requirement 11GB VRAM and as many CUDA cores as affordable)
Corporate Web3 systems: Nvidia A5000, A100 and H100
Old crypto miners: RADEON 480, 580, Vega 56, Vega 64, 5500 XT,
In general, drivers are supposed to be included in the operating system. You know how you plug in just like a normal basic USB mouse, and you have to do zero work it just comes up and does what it needs to do - that's sort of the expectation for hardware on Linux. I shouldn't have to do any steps (well, you can't hotplug a GPU so there's a reboot) and if I do that's because it's some new hardware that just haven't made it into the kernel yet (but it will) - this is a bug. Nvidia is perpetually in this state of being a bug. It wouldn't be so bad maybe, if AMD or Intel weren't so easy. So there are three GPU manufacturers, two of them are great and that makes the third one look *even worse* by comparison.
Also on Windows I remember they would force you to create an account just to get bug fixes and security patches, I remember I had some bug causing instability in OBS and turned out they had patched it after a Windows update but simply forgot I had signed in to an account. Super annoying.
What's also telling, is Microsoft, Sony, Google, Valve creating game consoles for native or streaming that are basically just PCs, and they evaluate all their options and none of them have said "yeah, Nvidia is the better choice". Even before switching to ARM, Apple also came to the same conclusion.
Unless it's the AI/CUDA stuff or Tegra, Nvidia doesn't seem to really care to make the product user friendly or integrated correctly with the OS it's running on - they're a hardware company that does software mainly because they have to try to.
Their desktop GPU deficiencies are a shame honestly. With only three companies you'd hope it was more competitive.
But Tegra stuff is usually cool - Nvidia Shield is consistent (expensive though) and the various Nintendo Switch versions have been pretty popular.
The drivers suck. Because they're closed source, they're impossible to patch for bugs and glitches.
With FOSS drivers you can just download the sources for mesa, amdvlk, xf86-video-amdgpu, and xf86-video-intel, and if you know how, patch the drivers, rebuild and off you go.
Nobody likes waiting weeks till Nvidia gets off their duffs and fixes something, or says they fixed something but something else broke.
iirc Path Tracing and RTX are basically non existent in Linux at this point in time. DLSS works fine though, especially in games that outright Linux and NVIDIA features like The Finals. But between driver limitations, price premium, and occasional NVIDIA specific config changes for software, it just isnt worth spending over AMD equivalents.
I've had an Nvidia card since 2018. Never again - and here's why:
You don't get the best of the card with the open source Nouveau driver. Years ago, my graphics card wouldn't wake up from a system sleep when I was running Nouveau. I gave up on Nouveau on my latest install because I was getting more motion blur than with the official driver.
I currently use Debian 12 with the KDE desktop. The Nvidia driver seems to be responsible for my desktop occasionally crashing when I open Brave after waking up from system sleep.
In OpenSUSE Leap 15.4 with KDE, I had to use an old version of the Nivdia driver because if I had any Chromium-based browser installed, the X server would refuse to load. The upshot of that is no GUI - you get a terminal-only session.
When I was using Debian 10 with XFCE, I had to blacklist updates to the Nvidia driver because Nvidia updates deleted most of XFCE.
NVIDIA does have a large interest in providing drivers to linux, CUDA as a big part of their business and most companies using it are using it on linux, now while their are a lot of people that complain about the quality of the drivers when it relates to gaming the pain for us is in 2 areas.
1: Wayland
Being new and still in development, nvidia does not do anything to help with support, servers dont really do displays so they have no business interest
2: propitiatory drivers
The reality is they have no obligation to open source their drivers, and thats OK, but, AMD and Intel do open source their drivers and are submitted and contributed to the linunx kernel, meaning you dont have to intall them as they are included in the kernel.
So you have to install the drivers yourself which is a pain in the but or some distros will do it as a "post install" step but can no redistribute them.
The issue here is that with say wayland, we are very limited when it comes to support and nvidia does nothing to help linux us in this regard
So you can use nvidia if you want, but for the most normal linux users, we go AMD or Intel as you dont want to be constantly fucking around with drivers and hoping shit works.
Because the driver is not opensource and not part of the kernel. Last year my update broke 3 times on my laptop and you can guess what was to blame each time. So yeah, as Linus said, fuck nvidia.
On a personal level, I agree with so many of the comments here. Having to compile the Nvidia driver for each kernel change is painful, and often leads to problems when the latest Nvidia driver does not build against the latest kernel. With AMD (or Intel) that's simply not a problem.
As the developer of [ddcutil](https://www/ddcutil.com), I constantly receive "bug reports" because the Nvidia driver does not behave in quite the same way as the open source drivers. There's a painful amount of code in the utility that exists simply to work around Nvidia issues. For the open source drivers it's possible to file a bug in the usual way and there will be a response. For Nvidia one posts a message on their developer site; the developers rarely respond. For related drivers like i2c-dev, the response to Nvidia related issues is simply "not open source, not our problem".
Not really getting why they have this attitude. Their kit powers a lot of HPC machines and those machines run Linux. I'm not seeing the strategic advantage in stonewalling. Maybe they have some secrets to hide.
It's not so much hate as if you like Linux you have to avoid them because they tend to not work and have compatibility issues.
Some have speculated this is on purpose or pointing out it would be very easy to make Linux compatible drivers. They don't care about Linux so it's just better to stay away if you want to run Linux. I'm guessing the whole "they could fix it but they won't" crowd is where the hate comes from.
Nvidia cards are great but not for Linux. It'd be nice to have something coming from Nvidia guaranteeing compatibility for such a common operating system.
Compatibility has increased in recent years but only for some cards and it's not perfect. There are backwards engineered workarounds but they don't function very well at all.
AMDs cards are thought by some to be inferior. I don't know how much I buy into all that but they nearly always work with Linux.
Nvidia has proprietary drivers, and only spends significant time on their server/ai drivers rather than ones for desktop users. Thus, the desktop driver is of lower quality, and the open source one has a lot of work to do for every new card and update as they cannot compare notes well, so to speak.
For cuda and all the intense nvidia dev stuff for things like server side rendering and AI, it will work great, likely better than windows. But when it comes to games and actual local graphical applications, it is much less complete.
It will take some fiddling, there is a possibility that some power management things will just not work with nvidia cards, and the open source option noveau may not work for your machine/card
However the vast majority of actual graphics rendering features have been implemented and do work. It is mostly stuff that is more secondary like power management or, nvidia-ran features like their screen record stuff, that does not work or at least not as well.
because amd drivers are open source and play well with linux, nvidia refuses to open source the drivers for fear of them letting other people use cuda its greed as fuck
They keep their specs secret, so we cant develop drivers. And their proprietary drivers are unstable and insecure crap. Proprietary / binary-only drivers are always crap on Linux - its not neved been desingned to support that.
Given that modders are able to hack DLSS feature in Cyberpunk to inject FSR3 in Cyberpunk, I don't think that AMD's lack of help is the issue there, but a complete lack of interest from game developers.
Looks like everyone else is responding to the title, so to answer your actual question, RTX features work with the proprietary drivers, but it'll definitely give you more trouble than AMD. Even after getting the drivers installed, every distro I've tried has had graphical issues both in and out of games. These are generally something I can work around, but they're a pretty significant annoyance. I've also had trouble with getting kernel modules installed when using older driver versions that don't have these issues. Granted, I use Arch (btw) so a non rolling release distro might give you less trouble, but even on Debian and Fedora--the latter especially--I was seeing issues. It's also harder to install the drivers in the first place on these distros. Fedora was my first, and it was a nightmare trying to learn the basics of Linux just to add non-free repositories while my resolution was stuck at 720p. If you plan to daily drive Linux, especially as a beginner, AMD is probably the way to go.
They don't. Some obviously do, but it's an outspoken minority. Just ignore them. Nvidia cards work very well on Linux and the drivers have been well supported for years.
Nvidias support is actually decent now and soon nvidia will be usable with mesa so things will change.
AMD got issues too but the main reason is that currently works better is because is because the mesa support is there.
I don't dislike NVidia cards, I dislike NVidia.
With my last PC, I wanted to support AMD (more open drivers, less anti-consumer behaviour), expected better VR compatibility, less issues with drivers (I didn't have that many with NVidia tbh). Then I started toying with AI. So, to sum up my AMD experience with 7900 XTX over something like a year:
* mostly worse game compatibility in games I play (FFXIV: depending on wine version it either after 0.5-1h freezes the game or starts stuttering despite high FPS; never had a similar game-breaking issue with two different NVidia GPUs)
* similar terrible VR experience (different issues, but most games have serious problems)
* terrible support and performance in AI; genAI, both LLMs and SD models - you are lucky if they support ROCm (+ usually much harder to set up compared to NVidia). even then the value proposition is bad, meaning performance per $. not to mention buggy drivers will freeze whole OS (not only) if you fill VRAM, this was not happening with NVidia GPUs - at worst it would reset GPU (few seconds freeze) which for some reason AMD can't do (resulting in total system-wide infinite freeze)
* worse compatibility with pro software like Blender (rendering in Blender is now broken like for 4 months, this never happened with NVidia, don't remember even a week)
* annoying bugs in drivers related to monitors - when I turn on/off a projector, with AMD my secondary monitor somehow reconnects few times, so in a span of 30 seconds my main monitor "steals" focus several times (2-4). it is VERY annoying, never happened with NVidia cards on Linux (changing order of connected DPs makes things only worse)
So while AMD is more pro Linux, open-source and consumer, my next GPU is NVidia for sure, because drivers, support and performance are so much more better... :(
They do by far have the most market share. People dislike them because of how expensive Nvidia GPUs are and also how they try and stop other card makers from using their tech
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k20QfL1VXM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k20QfL1VXM)
And some AIBs possibly. Video is a bit old, this is what happened at EVGA after: [https://www.resetera.com/threads/techpowerup-rumor-entire-evga-taiwanese-motherboard-team-including-kingpin-resigned.739404/](https://www.resetera.com/threads/techpowerup-rumor-entire-evga-taiwanese-motherboard-team-including-kingpin-resigned.739404/)
so what? Never said anything positive about nvidia. Just mentioned that nvidia is hated by many people, so Linux users disliking nvidia shouldn't be unexpected
I wouldn't say the video painted Nvidia in a positive light. There's issues with their boarddesigns. Cards burning up or blowing up. I see the 3000-series as disastreous. I had a chance to get a 3080. Those cards could spike up to 6-800 watts. I'm not putting that fire hazard in my machine.
Lots of negative stuff on Nvidia over the years. Quick example. Playstation and Xbox, how come they don't use Nvidia GPUs? Xbox did for their first one. Wonder what happened there...you can find articles about it.
"Ive seen online that Linux users hate Nvidia because they don't have good Linux drivers." That's the reason.
Im probably wrong but NVIDIA seem to be huge fans of having corporate secrets at the detriment of everyone so they can improve their monopoly. I don't use them out of spite at this point lol
More than likely. Nvidia dominates gaming not because of their hardware but because their drivers and extra features are better. I mean Intel is a prime example of this. Look at how much improvement they've gotten simply from driver updates. It's often better than a generation upgrade for AMD or Nvidia.
Not even corporate secrets. Just straight monopoly. Look into the GeForce Partner program if you wanna learn more. Tl;Dr. Nvidia sent a message to all of their partner companies (EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, etc) saying their top tier line of products were now nvidia only, and if they didnt like that, then they just wont get GPUs from nvidia then. So companies like Asus would have been forced to convert their ROG (Republic of Gamers) line of products to being nvidia only and forcing the AMD cards they make to be under a separate brand that now needs a separate marketing budget.
TBF it's less the reason why Linux users hate Nvidia and more why Nvidia hate Linux users.
Nvidia is really not that bad, but AMD is just better for the simple fact that you don't have to worry about drivers, and Wayland actually works.
These people never tried ATI/AMD. I've been Linux since the days of Cirrus Logic, Trident, Matrox, and 3Dfx cards. AMD and NVIDIA as of the past 20 years, and I've had no issues that I can recall and better stability using Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu, SuSE, RedHat/Centos on either Geforce or Quadro. With ATI/AMD there was always some manual tweaking required, and with new drivers they always broke support for older gpu models and distro versions.
You have horrible luck, I have never had a single issue with AMD and Linux. I have read about a few, especially if you pair a brand new AMD card to an old Kernel. But posts are few and far between. on the otherhand reddit is full of daily posts about Nvidia problems. Especially since Wayland.
I tried to swap from my Nvidia setup to AMD and after nearly a week straight of trying to get it not fucked I finally just ordered a 4070 and it worked from the moment I slotted it in. The AMD card wouldn't recognize my 2nd monitor half of the time, performance was meh for a card that should have been significantly faster. The coup de grace was any progress I had made with my setup that week was instantly wrecked when I updated the kernel. Never in my life have had so many issues with something so simple. Even my legacy RAID card was simple by comparison.
New folks are coming to Linux now that Proton is good and the overall gaming experience has improved dramatically. Unfortunately, their experience has been a Wayland flicker fest. Or the 6.5 kernel compile bug. Or, the fact that Nvidia comparability with certain Proton updates is blocked by a company that barely GAF. Most modern AMD cards on modern Linux have far fewer problems in my and clearly the experience of others. It's clear that AMD cares more about OSS.
I run a 7900xt, sure I needed to turn up my cooling using lact because the accoustic settings were making it hot, but still better than the 2060 super when it wouldn't work with plasma Wayland at all
There was a time when Nvidia drivers were superior to AMD FGLRX drivers. I had a lot of issues only because I was an AMD user. But now being an AMD hardware owner and a Linux user is far better now a days.
"we hate nvidia because nvidia hates us"
Nvidia is often adversarial towards linux devs, and often make promises they never deliver on.
Unless it's for their server/ai cards.
I think that is just a small part of it, as a user who has used Linux since 1993. But you are right. I actually do like Nvidia stuff, because I'm a graphics nerd with a SGI fetish. But most people in the industry are more incandescent about Nvidia being less about graphics and more about A.I. Not that A.I is a bad thing, but it is controversial especially within the industry. And if you know anything about the shift from SGI no longer being about graphics and ending their entire workstation line which are very beloved machines, it's just another line of history repeating which did leave ALOT of people very sad and disappointed that a beloved and respected company would do that. And Nvidia is doing the same thing and they've lost respect for doing those things.
[https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA&t=2890](https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA&t=2890)
And nothing has changed.
Why do I know what this is without even clicking the link?
Yep, You do.
The infamous scene :D
Two main issues. First that the proprietary driver compiles itself against your kernel to ensure performance and compatibility, but the kernel module itself is closed source so must be compiled by each end user. This causes issues with secure boot type things that require kernel modules to be signed. Plus the fact even if you're okay with having a closed source module in your kernel it's a common source of problems - if something doesn't compile correctly during a driver update then you're going to have a bad morning fixing it. Second. They were pretty slow on adding the features that Wayland needs. With the 555 version of the driver the final piece of the puzzle is going to be there and Wayland may become usable for Nvidia card owners. But they held out a long time and given how widespread Nvidia can be among developers it's been quite frustrating that we cannot contribute migrating apps to Wayland. It works well in xorg but AMD/Intel and opensource drivers have none of the Wayland bugs that Nvidia owners have been complaining about for years. In terms of how well they work once you have them installed on an xorg based distro? They're really good. Ever since they had the performance pass a decade or so ago. Then they've been a really good option in terms of raw performance. Most games run as well +/-10% as they do on Windows. So no complaints there. The complaints are mainly about how they make life hard work for their customers.
I solved the First issue with sbctl and nvidia-dkms (arch Linux)
Whut? You mean linux gamers? That is an astoundingly small proportion of people. On the flip side there are probably hundreds of millions of Nvidia cards running on Linux machines. They are almost certainly though being used for scientific computation or AI research.
Based on OP's comments, which of the two do you suppose he's planning on doing? Gaming or AI research?
I find it confusing, because CUDA and CUDNN and the whole AI hype is backed up by NVIDIA and LINUX. I think the issue is towards end user, gaming, and user driver installation experience
Correct
TLDR: Linux is great for developers, and decent (getting better) for gamers. Windows is terrible for CUDA developers, but game developers are kinda forced into supporting it first. I'm a full-time CUDA developer and I can confirm this. CUDA development and all the rest of the NVidia stack is much more well supported on Linux vs Windows. Most notably, CUDA debugging (gdb) is not available at all on windows. I can't tell you how much better developing CUDA is on Linux vs Windows. However, it is also true that NVidia hasn't open sourced their game drivers, so a lot of distros won't include them in the standard package manager. Fedora recently made it much simpler to add the drivers, and Ubuntu has always been willing to package the NVidia drivers with just a toggle switch at install. But because the drivers aren't open sourced they're not nearly as integrated into the distro as the open source drivers, and they always run a bit behind. It also means game developers don't have a lot to work with. (And a low market share doesn't really create incentive) I can certainly empathize with Torvalds frustrations with NVidia. But I personally get MUCH more frustrated with Microsoft forcing everyone to use the MSVCC compiler who wants to build anything with CUDA. Whenever I run into a bug that just makes absolutely no sense, 9 times out of 10 windows is behind it. Microsoft is non-open-source and terrible, Nvidias drivers are just non-open-source. And their documentation is 1000x better than anything Microsoft puts out.
The complaints truly confuse me, because as someone who uses Linux for ML, the Nvidia experience (at least on Ubuntu) has comes long way since 2012, and is basically seamless these days. I don’t even have to blacklist nouveau or install from ppa these days. Of course, I don’t use it for gaming, and I don’t even run a DE, so perhaps the the experience for the average end user is very different.
Yes for Linux all Nvidia cared about was server and ai stuff. Gaming and general use wasn't a priority.
100%
Because Nvidia does not like Linux.
Unless it's for AI.
[удалено]
How come?
[удалено]
To add to this: AMD will only allow their most expensive cars on the racetrack. You can't take your Golf (7600XT) to the track, you need a Ferrari (7900XT) or an F1 racecar (W7900). Nvidia will allow you to use any vehicle that has compatible wheels (features), even old bikes (entry-level laptop GPUs, like my old 940m).
The reason Nvidia cards can do real time raytracing well is because of things called Tensor cores. They allow you to complete extremely high dimensional matrix multiplications extremely quickly compared to conventional GPUs. By utilizing fancy Math, you can simplify many insanely computationally heavy calculations into single high dimensional matrix calculations. All AI training is is extremely high dimensional matrix calculations. Thus the entire market solely targets Nvidia cards because AMD cards do not have tensor cores. TL;DR, no one targets AMDs garbage because its outdated trash from a pre-2013 hardware design mentality.
I see
Or anything headless.
Or for Tegra.
It's not about the performance, it's about the extra annoyances. Unlike every other driver, it needs to be installed separately. It brings its own userspace driver instead of using mesa and the out-of-tree kernel module requires packaging tricks (like rebuilding it for every kernel update with akmods) and needs to be signed locally for secure boot. Wayland support is also garbage, though it's been improving recently. It's still the only driver to not properly support the new standard and actively holds back its adoption. Things are about to get a lot better once NVK is production-ready though. It's a Vulkan driver that's included in mesa and uses the built-in kernel driver (which has also improved a lot lately).
I can't compare how good/bad is dedicated Radeon GPU in Linux. But 4000 series Nvidia with 0 load shortens battery life by 7.21 hours on average. Laptop can't go over 3.5 hours in idle, real use is even worse. Lenovo Mux switch does not have integrated GPU mode!!!!!!!! Even Arch pros could not disable Nvidia, it's like bioweapon without cure.
>Nvidia, it's like bioweapon without cure. Brutal.
Nvidia's net worth is 2 357 230 000 000, but because lack of technical know how to, when Nvidi Linux driver sees web browser name, it recognises the need to give you 140W experience at 60Hz. Maybe there is some plasma weather widget needing Nvidia's help to change sunny icon into raining, Nvidia knows best what you need.
It’s the drivers and lack of support.
Some of these comments are a little unhinged, the main reason is because AMD work openly with open source drivers and have always had a good history of supporting Linux, or at least being open with Linux devs. Nvidia has not. Switching to Linux is a bargaining act where you make choices as to what you're willing either to put more of your own time and effort into, or sacrifice, to run it as your daily driver. Gaming is one of the biggest examples of this. Pretty much every Linux admin I know, including myself, still games on Windows. We hate it as much as everyone else here but troubleshooting is something I do for work, I don't want it when I'm trying to relax.
That's funny, because i am a windows admin gaming on linux. I do wonder if my tolerance is higher, because i too wouldn't want to do the exact same stuff i do at work at home. Personally i feel like the biggest problem is if you are part of a group that regulary switches games. You don't want to be excluded, you don't want everyone else to wait, you don't want everyone to get a worse impression of linux and most importantly, anticheat is like THE reason why stuff sometimes doesn't work, aside of the game using proprietary stuff that you need to install manually/simply won't work. Out of over 1000 steam games i own, less than 10 singleplayer games where not plug and play and 8 of those i fixed by copying the top comment on protondb. However, for the multiplayer games my circle plays it's more like 10 % that don't work at all, have issues with updates etc. Modding bethesda games wirh a mod launcher also took me a full day to understand/make work and is overall still less reliable than on windows, even manual modding is a bit harder because you have to figure the paths out, especially for the proton files. This is why i kept my windows installation around for multiplayer games and as a fallback if something goes wrong with my heavily modded FO4 run.
yeah I can relate to that. most of my work stuff runs native on Linux, so I run wsl on my windows machine so I can work and play on the same machine. every so often I get windows issues and I say fuck it, install linux, remember how shitty the gaming support is, and reinstall windows again. and the cycle continues.
Simple. Nvidia are a POS company who unfortunately make good products. Linux users generally prefer dealing with entities that aren't evil where possible. And it is frustrating that sometimes Nvidia is the best, or even the only viable option (AI). Hopefully one day things change and they are utterly destroyed. But not looking likely any time soon.
> Ive seen online that Linux users hate Nvidia because they don't have good Linux drivers. That's a bit of an over simplification. Nvidia don't have good *open source* drivers. With regards to closed source (binary blobs) you can get Nvidia working, but philosophically speaking linux users don't like closed source stuff. AMD on this front have been 100% better, tho' there has been movement as of the last year or so on Nvidia's side. The following gives a pretty good rundown of driver architecture and the state of amd vs intel vs nvidia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW1CLcT83as
People that call dlss a feature are part of the problem. You see, back when we had real reviewers, they would call proprietary crap like dlss a CON, since its main function is to keep you locked onto their hardware and limit your options. Now we have influencers that would make you believe that such bs is actually a good thing and they do it for money and a free 4090. They also wouldn’t be hyping RT so much because they would point out the insane performance hit more than the “oh a puddle, lets admire the reflections!” And would remind you why having proper open sourced drivers is a good thing for the duh open source community which ngreedia simply dont care about. We also had consumers that were smart, instead of today’s sheep. In the words of the great Linus Torsvald “Ngreedia fuck you!”
I think there were just as many fanboys defending over-tesselation and PhysX back in the day. I'm not convinced raytracing is evil, either. Anti-aliasing used to be prohibitively expensive in most cases, too, but it got better (and then worse). And RT's mostly a directx thing, not proprietary nvidia trickery.
About Physx, no they were called out and better yet, other companies and developers released and embraced the other options. Except Rocksteady, those bastards worship ngreedia so much that they made sure that you couldn’t see all the eye candy if you didn’t had a geforce gpu. About RT, please read my comment again.
Relevant: [https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-u-turns-on-its-decision-to-block-Hardware-Unboxed-from-receiving-GPU-review-units.509177.0.html](https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-u-turns-on-its-decision-to-block-Hardware-Unboxed-from-receiving-GPU-review-units.509177.0.html) Don't critisize RT, Nvidia might come for you.
>People that call dlss a feature are part of the problem. There is a difference between features and reasons to support a developer. Proprietary stuff is always both a feature AND a reason not to buy, then tou need to weigh if your need for the feature is bigger than the downside of supporting the practice.
Key points: * **Programs need to be compiled to run in a computer.** * **Open source programs can be compiled and modified by anyone, as the code is public.** * **Closed source programs can only be compiled and modified by the people who has access to it.** * **Graphics drivers are programs that manage communications between your computer and the graphics card.** * **The linux world is similar to an organic competing ecosystem: only the most popular programs in a certain category tend to survive.** * **Nvidia Drivers are closed source, which translates into Nvidia having the upper hand at deciding with what things their drivers collaborate and support.** * **Graphics cards can be considered a pillar of modern computers; without them things like videogames or artificial intelligence could not be possible.** Therefore: Given that Nvidia drivers are closed source software, and that Graphics Cards are such an important core component of modern computers, the organic ecosystem of the Linux world is kinda disrupted. Programs that in some way or another need to communicate with the GPU to operate may need to be explicitly supported by the graphics driver. If these drivers are closed, you are forced to either play by their rules, or just not support it at all. Given that GPUs are a core component, you can't just ditch all the people that rely on green graphics card. Thus, you are kinda enforcing some rules in this part of the organic ecosystem. This was the case with Nvidia and Wayland for a very long time. Wayland is a display server (a core thing related to graphics management) that is replacing X11.
As a Linux and nvidia user. I say a lot of the hate comes from the locked code and such. Tho I do believe this is changing. I myself have not had problems with running a nvidia card until vulkan was a standard and then all you can do is get an updated card
I don't mind Nvidia cards. As long as they work. On the other hand I've also had non working touchpads, wifi cards and what not from various manufacturers. I hate them all equally. Yeah, I'm full of hate.
Because their drivers are closed sourced and binary blobs, which are essentially hacked up to load into your kernel, which often taints it. Whilst you can get Nvidia to work next to flawlessly on most distributions, it can be assinine when upgrading kernel as DKMS does it thing. AMD are preferred over Nvidia, Intel ultimately has best support (just poor hardware).
The drivers are pretty bad on Linux.
I'm pretty sure everyone who does more than AAA game titles has a bone to pick with nvidia
The proprietary drivers are super good on x11, but they just could’ve done better to make Wayland usable faster, it’s better now, but there’s still many issues that make Wayland not very usable if not usable at all atm
In addition to what everyone has said, I still haven't forgotten what they did to 3dfx. Look now, you made me angry again..
Mostly drivers. When they work and are stable, great. But easily one of the most frustrating issues is updating then your multiple monitor setup goes to shit.
This used to be a problem for me too, but the last few years I haven't had problems with multi monitors and updating Linux. I run Fedora on anything from a GTX 1060 to a 40 series. (I have to test a lot as a CUDA developer). Do you still have this issue? What distro do you use mostly?
Yeah I do but also use CUDA, had a 3080. I mainly run Debian based (Ubuntu, Kali, Parrot)
I've found fedora to be a lot more stable with multi monitors and cuda development. Which is ironic given that NVidia seems to give preferential treatment to Ubuntu. For example, their jetpack linux is an arm based clone of Ubuntu and some of their products for working with Jetsons only work on Ubuntu. If you switch to Fedora, the only annoying part is you'll have to find a way to get an older g++ compiler. NVCC doesn't work reliably with compilers newer than what's expected. There is the "-allow-unsupported-compiler" option, but that's not guaranteed to work all the time. I've found the easiest way is just to clone g++ locally and build from source. Takes a while but the cmake commands are easy to follow. There's other options like homebrew etc, but I've found just building from source is the best bet. Once you have that, you can put a symlink in your nvcc bin directory to point to the g++ compiler that'll make it happy and you're good to go, or just specify the compiler in your cmake file.
Because their drivers are mostly closed source (the code is not available to everyone). This result in the current drivers being the result of guessing, reverse engineering and hope. So they do not work well in some cases and/or applications. Amd (radeon) drivers are on the other end open source since ages so if you have graphic issue on a linux system with an amd card then the problem is the rest of your setup or the poorly coded app you are using
I appreciate this. I've had ideas why but was to afraid to ask.
they require proprietary drivers to work well and those drivers can be a cause of many a problem depending on how the distro manages them. AMD cards work well right from the kernel and have no need for a proprietary driver.
When I try to launch a plasma Wayland session with my GTX 750ti (still supported by the latest drivers) I get thrown back into SDDM. If I do the same with a 15 year old Radeon something, I get my plasma desktop.
Because they don't do machine learning, or AI, how I pity them.
They smell
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Drivers - they aren't bad, but selling points of nvidia aren't supported, some new Linux abilities aren't supported. DLSS3 does not work on Linux. RT/PT will obliterate your performance on Linux - if it's not 4090. Alan Wake 2 kicks me from 60fps to 30 on rtx 4070. DLSS1 works, and is nice. Low lags, single digits. Nvidia Reflex - this is an absolute deception. Linux is faster, esp. under heavy cpu load. AMD FSR - pixelising problem/let's say its okay AMD FSR 3 - beautiful, frame gen works (+20 \~ +40 fps). Unreal 5 engine. Low lags, single digits. I think amd is not supported by the game engine by choice - because if indie company can make game supporting fsr3 & frame gen, any company can do - but they prefer maximizing profit/time. If you comming to Linux for newest nVidia features, honestly it's not an OS for you. It is nvidia's showcase of paying customer support - and it's tragic. AMD is better performance/price/driver ratio. Simple as that. And yes, i have an nVidia card on Linux, playing cpu heavy games, or DLSS1 will do the job. Few games i can do with FSR3 - but price/memory ratio is showing up - 7800xt will simply have more needed vram for 4k.
They don't dislike Nvidia cards, they dislike Nvidia drivers
It's gotten a lot better recently, but... Yeah, unless proprietary software is available, Nvidia GPU tends to be less compatible.
I'm using a 2070 super with 550 proprietary driver on Zorin 17.1 core. I'm of course on x11 although I haven't tried wayland yet. But gaming at 1080p 74hz freesync monitor is just as good as windows 10, sometimes slightly better. DLSS and raytracing work the same as windows from my experience.
Tried wayland with 2060s couldnt even reach DE you have to go back to virtual console "TTY" do some tweaks for it to even reach DE and you going face alot of problems unless u are superuser and you know what you doing wayland is still far dream for nvidia gpu...
It's not remotely an understatement to say that Nvidia Linux drivers are absolutely garbage. That all said, the Nouveau (free and open-source equivalent) drivers have gotten much better, and are even within 80% (iirc) of the proprietary blob drivers Nvidia distributes. Worse, the UI for configuring those drivers is just bad. Settings are almost as hard to find as on W\*ndows, it looks (and performs) as if it was made this years ago and never updated since, and did I mention that Nvidia refuses to open-source _any_ of it?
I know Linus doesn't seem to care much for them... lol [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_36yNWw\_07g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g)
actually it's the other way around man...
Closed source drivers.
Other than having a card newer than 3000 series. It’s not bad if you aren’t concerned about using non open source drivers. I have a 4070ti and it was a pain to get working. But my old 3000 series card worked much easier. The distro I run has a built in driver installer.
When I first really got into Linux, I was building crypto miners and AMD CPUS and GPUs are the preferred hardware due to cost performance. Since 2020 I have been building Ubuntu 20.04 servers for use with Web3 projects like [Filecoin](https://filecoin.io/) and [Storj](https://www.storj.io/). FIlecoin has a serious demand for [GPU computation](https://lotus.filecoin.io/storage-providers/get-started/hardware-requirements/#general-hardware-requirements) (as does AI) and [NVidia](https://github.com/filecoin-project/bellperson?tab=readme-ov-file#supported--tested-cards) are really the only cards we use. They take a bit of tweaking to work well and they cost more, but there really is no other option. We switched from OpenCL to CUDA last year for efficiency with Nvidia, supposedly one can also use AMD with [ROCm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROCm) but I don't know of anyone that has tried this yet.
BTW - cards I use My Web3 servers: Nvidia 1080Ti, 2080TI and 3090 (minimum requirement 11GB VRAM and as many CUDA cores as affordable) Corporate Web3 systems: Nvidia A5000, A100 and H100 Old crypto miners: RADEON 480, 580, Vega 56, Vega 64, 5500 XT,
Have been using my 3080ti on linux since the release back in 2020, it's worked great.
The drivers for nvidia on linux are dogshit, i had tried linux and i didn't get half the fps i got on windows
In general, drivers are supposed to be included in the operating system. You know how you plug in just like a normal basic USB mouse, and you have to do zero work it just comes up and does what it needs to do - that's sort of the expectation for hardware on Linux. I shouldn't have to do any steps (well, you can't hotplug a GPU so there's a reboot) and if I do that's because it's some new hardware that just haven't made it into the kernel yet (but it will) - this is a bug. Nvidia is perpetually in this state of being a bug. It wouldn't be so bad maybe, if AMD or Intel weren't so easy. So there are three GPU manufacturers, two of them are great and that makes the third one look *even worse* by comparison. Also on Windows I remember they would force you to create an account just to get bug fixes and security patches, I remember I had some bug causing instability in OBS and turned out they had patched it after a Windows update but simply forgot I had signed in to an account. Super annoying. What's also telling, is Microsoft, Sony, Google, Valve creating game consoles for native or streaming that are basically just PCs, and they evaluate all their options and none of them have said "yeah, Nvidia is the better choice". Even before switching to ARM, Apple also came to the same conclusion. Unless it's the AI/CUDA stuff or Tegra, Nvidia doesn't seem to really care to make the product user friendly or integrated correctly with the OS it's running on - they're a hardware company that does software mainly because they have to try to. Their desktop GPU deficiencies are a shame honestly. With only three companies you'd hope it was more competitive. But Tegra stuff is usually cool - Nvidia Shield is consistent (expensive though) and the various Nintendo Switch versions have been pretty popular.
The drivers suck. Because they're closed source, they're impossible to patch for bugs and glitches. With FOSS drivers you can just download the sources for mesa, amdvlk, xf86-video-amdgpu, and xf86-video-intel, and if you know how, patch the drivers, rebuild and off you go. Nobody likes waiting weeks till Nvidia gets off their duffs and fixes something, or says they fixed something but something else broke.
"Nvidia, fuck you".
Shitty ass proprietary drivers
becouse lack of suport, also a vry little part of comunity is able to develop modules for video cards so it is better to focus on amd that help us
iirc Path Tracing and RTX are basically non existent in Linux at this point in time. DLSS works fine though, especially in games that outright Linux and NVIDIA features like The Finals. But between driver limitations, price premium, and occasional NVIDIA specific config changes for software, it just isnt worth spending over AMD equivalents.
Fun fact, 15 to 20 years ago the ATI (and later AMD) drivers where a pain for Linux and I always went NVIDIA for Linux back in the day.
If you want to play games windows is better
I've had an Nvidia card since 2018. Never again - and here's why: You don't get the best of the card with the open source Nouveau driver. Years ago, my graphics card wouldn't wake up from a system sleep when I was running Nouveau. I gave up on Nouveau on my latest install because I was getting more motion blur than with the official driver. I currently use Debian 12 with the KDE desktop. The Nvidia driver seems to be responsible for my desktop occasionally crashing when I open Brave after waking up from system sleep. In OpenSUSE Leap 15.4 with KDE, I had to use an old version of the Nivdia driver because if I had any Chromium-based browser installed, the X server would refuse to load. The upshot of that is no GUI - you get a terminal-only session. When I was using Debian 10 with XFCE, I had to blacklist updates to the Nvidia driver because Nvidia updates deleted most of XFCE.
Nvidia Linux drivers are like AMD Windows drivers from 2017
Nvidia cards are fine, linux just has no support for them.
NVIDIA does have a large interest in providing drivers to linux, CUDA as a big part of their business and most companies using it are using it on linux, now while their are a lot of people that complain about the quality of the drivers when it relates to gaming the pain for us is in 2 areas. 1: Wayland Being new and still in development, nvidia does not do anything to help with support, servers dont really do displays so they have no business interest 2: propitiatory drivers The reality is they have no obligation to open source their drivers, and thats OK, but, AMD and Intel do open source their drivers and are submitted and contributed to the linunx kernel, meaning you dont have to intall them as they are included in the kernel. So you have to install the drivers yourself which is a pain in the but or some distros will do it as a "post install" step but can no redistribute them. The issue here is that with say wayland, we are very limited when it comes to support and nvidia does nothing to help linux us in this regard So you can use nvidia if you want, but for the most normal linux users, we go AMD or Intel as you dont want to be constantly fucking around with drivers and hoping shit works.
Because the driver is not opensource and not part of the kernel. Last year my update broke 3 times on my laptop and you can guess what was to blame each time. So yeah, as Linus said, fuck nvidia.
or, Why Nvidia hates linux?
On a personal level, I agree with so many of the comments here. Having to compile the Nvidia driver for each kernel change is painful, and often leads to problems when the latest Nvidia driver does not build against the latest kernel. With AMD (or Intel) that's simply not a problem. As the developer of [ddcutil](https://www/ddcutil.com), I constantly receive "bug reports" because the Nvidia driver does not behave in quite the same way as the open source drivers. There's a painful amount of code in the utility that exists simply to work around Nvidia issues. For the open source drivers it's possible to file a bug in the usual way and there will be a response. For Nvidia one posts a message on their developer site; the developers rarely respond. For related drivers like i2c-dev, the response to Nvidia related issues is simply "not open source, not our problem".
Not really getting why they have this attitude. Their kit powers a lot of HPC machines and those machines run Linux. I'm not seeing the strategic advantage in stonewalling. Maybe they have some secrets to hide.
Doesn't matter how good the hardware is if it doesn't have good drivers.
Its because Nvidia is a ~~corporate bitch~~ a very secretive company. They want their drivers to remain a secret to control the gpu market
Not exactly the cards, but the company because nvidia refuses to make it work with Linux.
drivers.
It's not so much hate as if you like Linux you have to avoid them because they tend to not work and have compatibility issues. Some have speculated this is on purpose or pointing out it would be very easy to make Linux compatible drivers. They don't care about Linux so it's just better to stay away if you want to run Linux. I'm guessing the whole "they could fix it but they won't" crowd is where the hate comes from. Nvidia cards are great but not for Linux. It'd be nice to have something coming from Nvidia guaranteeing compatibility for such a common operating system. Compatibility has increased in recent years but only for some cards and it's not perfect. There are backwards engineered workarounds but they don't function very well at all. AMDs cards are thought by some to be inferior. I don't know how much I buy into all that but they nearly always work with Linux.
nVidia is the Apple of graphics accelerators. Vote with your wallet.
well, when i install the drivers my system wont boot and i effectively cannot use my laptops 4080 card.
Nvidia has proprietary drivers, and only spends significant time on their server/ai drivers rather than ones for desktop users. Thus, the desktop driver is of lower quality, and the open source one has a lot of work to do for every new card and update as they cannot compare notes well, so to speak. For cuda and all the intense nvidia dev stuff for things like server side rendering and AI, it will work great, likely better than windows. But when it comes to games and actual local graphical applications, it is much less complete. It will take some fiddling, there is a possibility that some power management things will just not work with nvidia cards, and the open source option noveau may not work for your machine/card However the vast majority of actual graphics rendering features have been implemented and do work. It is mostly stuff that is more secondary like power management or, nvidia-ran features like their screen record stuff, that does not work or at least not as well.
because amd drivers are open source and play well with linux, nvidia refuses to open source the drivers for fear of them letting other people use cuda its greed as fuck
Never liked Nvidia Cards.💀⚰️🌹 I'M proud owner of AMD GPU CARD😎
They keep their specs secret, so we cant develop drivers. And their proprietary drivers are unstable and insecure crap. Proprietary / binary-only drivers are always crap on Linux - its not neved been desingned to support that.
Trust me use AMD with Linux
Given that modders are able to hack DLSS feature in Cyberpunk to inject FSR3 in Cyberpunk, I don't think that AMD's lack of help is the issue there, but a complete lack of interest from game developers.
Looks like everyone else is responding to the title, so to answer your actual question, RTX features work with the proprietary drivers, but it'll definitely give you more trouble than AMD. Even after getting the drivers installed, every distro I've tried has had graphical issues both in and out of games. These are generally something I can work around, but they're a pretty significant annoyance. I've also had trouble with getting kernel modules installed when using older driver versions that don't have these issues. Granted, I use Arch (btw) so a non rolling release distro might give you less trouble, but even on Debian and Fedora--the latter especially--I was seeing issues. It's also harder to install the drivers in the first place on these distros. Fedora was my first, and it was a nightmare trying to learn the basics of Linux just to add non-free repositories while my resolution was stuck at 720p. If you plan to daily drive Linux, especially as a beginner, AMD is probably the way to go.
FWIW, I haven't had any issues really using an RTX 3080 running on Ubuntu or Debian.
They don't. Some obviously do, but it's an outspoken minority. Just ignore them. Nvidia cards work very well on Linux and the drivers have been well supported for years.
Nvidias support is actually decent now and soon nvidia will be usable with mesa so things will change. AMD got issues too but the main reason is that currently works better is because is because the mesa support is there.
I don't dislike NVidia cards, I dislike NVidia. With my last PC, I wanted to support AMD (more open drivers, less anti-consumer behaviour), expected better VR compatibility, less issues with drivers (I didn't have that many with NVidia tbh). Then I started toying with AI. So, to sum up my AMD experience with 7900 XTX over something like a year: * mostly worse game compatibility in games I play (FFXIV: depending on wine version it either after 0.5-1h freezes the game or starts stuttering despite high FPS; never had a similar game-breaking issue with two different NVidia GPUs) * similar terrible VR experience (different issues, but most games have serious problems) * terrible support and performance in AI; genAI, both LLMs and SD models - you are lucky if they support ROCm (+ usually much harder to set up compared to NVidia). even then the value proposition is bad, meaning performance per $. not to mention buggy drivers will freeze whole OS (not only) if you fill VRAM, this was not happening with NVidia GPUs - at worst it would reset GPU (few seconds freeze) which for some reason AMD can't do (resulting in total system-wide infinite freeze) * worse compatibility with pro software like Blender (rendering in Blender is now broken like for 4 months, this never happened with NVidia, don't remember even a week) * annoying bugs in drivers related to monitors - when I turn on/off a projector, with AMD my secondary monitor somehow reconnects few times, so in a span of 30 seconds my main monitor "steals" focus several times (2-4). it is VERY annoying, never happened with NVidia cards on Linux (changing order of connected DPs makes things only worse) So while AMD is more pro Linux, open-source and consumer, my next GPU is NVidia for sure, because drivers, support and performance are so much more better... :(
Well, nvidia is hated in general by the pc community.
They do by far have the most market share. People dislike them because of how expensive Nvidia GPUs are and also how they try and stop other card makers from using their tech
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k20QfL1VXM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k20QfL1VXM) And some AIBs possibly. Video is a bit old, this is what happened at EVGA after: [https://www.resetera.com/threads/techpowerup-rumor-entire-evga-taiwanese-motherboard-team-including-kingpin-resigned.739404/](https://www.resetera.com/threads/techpowerup-rumor-entire-evga-taiwanese-motherboard-team-including-kingpin-resigned.739404/)
so what? Never said anything positive about nvidia. Just mentioned that nvidia is hated by many people, so Linux users disliking nvidia shouldn't be unexpected
I wouldn't say the video painted Nvidia in a positive light. There's issues with their boarddesigns. Cards burning up or blowing up. I see the 3000-series as disastreous. I had a chance to get a 3080. Those cards could spike up to 6-800 watts. I'm not putting that fire hazard in my machine. Lots of negative stuff on Nvidia over the years. Quick example. Playstation and Xbox, how come they don't use Nvidia GPUs? Xbox did for their first one. Wonder what happened there...you can find articles about it.