I have a 3090 that I will replace with an AMD card the second it makes financial sense for me.

Every fucking time. Last night I was having a bunch of crashes after normal use. And yep, it was related to the Nvidia driver…

Upgraded to an AMD card and suddenly Linux became perfectly reliable.

Am I the only one who has no problems with Nvidia drivers?

There's a lot of PTSD from linux users in the before-time.

Don't get me started on trying to compile 3Com network drivers.

Nope. Zero issues here on three different machines.

Drivers can be weird though and small differences can be all it needs to cause massive issues.

Yes. Don't brag.

In all seriousness I haven't used nvidia for ~ 6 years. Back then my issues on nvidia were periodic updates breaking, or with multi monitors. On amd ive never had a driver update break...ive also switched to a single very large 4k so that may also help.

I've had a bastard of a time with Nvidia drivers in the past few weeks, though I'm honest enough to accept that a big chunk of that could well be a combination of user error, and that I have a fairly old 1060 GPU.

Nvidia drivers have worked fine for me on Mint, Parrot, and Artix. The only downside is they are pretty bloated and want to be loaded early in the boot process, so it adds several seconds to the initramfs load.

I haven't tried compiling the image without them, mostly because it's only a few seconds on boot and I don't enjoy repairing broken boot images.

If you don't have a video card, you don't have (video) driver issues.

It depends on both the hardware and distro. I got a laptop RTX 3070 and depending on the distro I got different problems.

On Linux mint, running some games in full screen will freeze the main screen

On fedora KDE/Nobara, you can have an incompatible kernel version getting installed as an update, borking the system.

On nix os KDE, blender doesn't want to render anything after waking from sleep (may be a blender issue.)

Those AI slopping MFers just broke my shit just last week.

Serial terminal gang represent!

The funny thing is that for a long time nvidia was the GPU brand to get on Linux because ATI (now AMD) drivers were just as closed but sucked ass.

Using Fedora - sometimes akmods fails to build the kernel module after a kernel update, but that's fixed with a single command (sudo akmods --rebuild --force) and a reboot. Besides that, it's been rock solid.

On OpenSUSE I had constantly problems. But I heard that they release Kernel updates faster and sometimes the NVidia driver isn't ready yet for the new kernel.

It might have been another story with the old driver architecture...

@RustyNova @MyNameIsRichard >On nix os, blender doesn’t want to render anything after waking from sleep (may be a blender issue.)seems to be cuda issue. On my machine cuda sometimes refusing to work after sleep, requiring some 'node restart'Might be fixed by disabling modeset (nvidia-drm modeset=0), or by blocking display server from using nvidia drm node (if display output does not use nvidia)

I use AMD GPUs.

Imo back in the days amd wasn't any better

Yes it never worked right. Specially in all shitty laptops with a discrete nvidia card and how they all had different ways to be integrated. At least for personal laptops I only buy ones with simple integrated graphics, but was always a shitty situation with work laptops. It was particularly fun knowing that the hdmi port was only connected to the nvidia card so if I disabled the nvidia card on the bios basic shit like that wouldn't work. Let's not even mention how it was constantly crashing for sleep or when waking up.

I switched to Linux because the nvidia drivers on windows got so bad my GPU was crashing once every boot. On Linux I regularly have significantly worse performance (especially in VR) but its more stable. I'm fine with a lower fps rather than just getting kicked out of games when the driver crashes.

Would be nice if they worked on those performance issues, though.

I'm not even an AMD fanperson. But in the last 20 years it only made once sense for me to buy Nvidia with the offerings at hands, my budget and my needs. I will never get why they are THIS popular.

No.

I'm in the same boat. As soon as I can get comparable performance at a price I can afford, I'm jumping ship from team green.

I had a 3060 and it wasn't that Linux wasn't reliable but it occasionally would receive an update that would require a video card driver update as well. I bought a 9070xt, sold the 3060, and haven't had a single issue since.

I'm yet to know what I'm missing out on since switching a decade ago. The grass has always been greener. Great performance; no hassles.

No issues here either, I screwed up a driver update leaving Debian repos to actual Nvidia repos but other than that no issues

2-3 years ago when I tried Fedora (I think shortly before Fedora 41 released)? Yeah, after a few hours of figuring out how to get them installed I had serious screen artifact issues still, and ultimately ended up back on Windows.

Trying Bazzite a couple months ago with the drivers preinstalled and functional out of the box? No problems since then, games just work (except Crimson Desert for a month, but I didn't actually care to play it so that was fine), and I can actually focus on learning Linux without stressing over whether I can play my games.

Meh. I actually like it because it reminds me to save the file.

Although nice domain name lol

Yeah on fedora or any other rolling distros you've got to look it up online if an Nvidia driver has been released before upgrading the kernel. I always forget to do that and I'm forced to touch grass for a few days until the driver gets released.

It was actually worse until they open sourced their drivers.

I don't game as much as I used to, but for the games I do play, I'm not seeing many (or any) problems. Video encoding with ffmpeg through nvenc works fine too.
Current issues I'm having are 3d acceleration in KVM under Wayland. Apparently it only works with nouveau? Not a deal breaker in any sense, just the latest observation.

Yeah, the nVidia shituation is much better than a decade+ ago, nowdays I just have to manually pause upgrades (of drivers, kernel, or both) for a few weeks once evey two years or so.

I need to buy me some AMD. And AMD/Intel needs to build some high end GPU (for consumers I mean).

No, they work just fine for me on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. They load and compile in updates and that's all there is.

I've got a really old one, a 1060 or 1070 I forgot. Zero issues

Personally that was a deal breaker for me. After a long day at work, coming back to chill out and do some blender only to find out your setup is booked and now you have to fix the system, it really gets on you.

Thankfully I had an old Linux mint partition I never cleaned up (Too lazy), so I could have continue, but the average user would just go "fuck Linux. Going back to windows".

I have an almost 20-year old laptop with an nvidia card as old as it is. I’m running Mint on it and never encountered any issues with it in particular. To be fair, using Mint also probably made it less of a headache as it sorted out the drivers automatically during setup.

I remember specifically buying an Nvidia GPU in 2009 because their proprietary driver was awesome and could do multi monitors properly using their proprietary X11 extension called TwinView

Why you choose Nvidia above all? Just dump it and live happily ever after.

Still is. I had to reinstall linux the other day because Nvidia fucked everything up. It wasn't the first time.

I use btrfs with snapshots now.

Maybe it’s because mine is old, but my NVIDIA card never interfered with running Mint.

Sure, just let me put that fully operational graphic card that can run games fine in the trashcan, shell out another thousand dollar or so on a new card for absolutely no other reason than to appease the internet crowd. It's so easy, why isn't everyone doing it.

Y'all I would happily take all yalls nvidia GPUs.

(Slackware has made using nvidia drivers easy for so long now I'm surprised the other distros haven't fucking figured it out.)

Lot's of circlejerking online. I have no doubt that some people have issues while having an nvidia card, and I also have no doubt that in some cases the driver might be to blame.

But unless you fiddle things, go out of your way to "optimize things" by following some random posts or something like that, most common distros handles nvidia drivers properly. The same usual disclaimers applies though; being "bleeding edge" means you'll cut yourself, and all that.

For people that just install a system (and I mean something well known to work, not "the latest craze you absolutely have to replace everything with", it's fine. They (nvidia) even ironed out most of wayland issues for a while now. There are still some minor lingering issues, but nothing most average users will notice.

Since I started using arch I've been fine. Ubuntu was rough though. Since Ubuntu and derivatives are mostly considered beginner friendly I can see how it might be a bigger issue. Maybe it is also a problem with older cards that don't get as many updates.

Nvidia drivers have been pretty stable on linux for awhile now. My main problem with nvidia atm is lack of support for hardware acceleration for Android emulation

The problem is not "using the drivers". It's the driver quality.

Yeah, no... If the most basic stuff like controlling your fan speed is broken for literal years (utility needed root permissions, yet using su or sudo made it crash), that's not some fault of users having too esoteric demands but pure and simple Nvidia idiocy.

I'd like to believe they mean on the next GPU you get, but not everyone can just upgrade their card. But if you can, dump Nvidia in the daily driver asap, as long as it's reasonable to do so.

Also, side tangent, but remember when the whole computer cost a grand? I miss those days.

Mint has worked fine with my 1060, 2060, and now 3060.

It's been fairly good for me on bazzite with my Nvidia card. I have to set some launch options in Steam from time to time to make HDR work but otherwise I'm happy (I had Nvidia issues on a different machine using Ubuntu but switched to different drivers and things improved)