There are many reasons to dislike Nvidia on Linux. Here is a little thing that bugs me all the time, the updates. Normally the system updates would be quick and fast, but with the proprietary drivers of Nvidia involved, it gets quiet slow process. And I am not even talking about any other problem I encounter, just about the updates.
As an Archlinux based system user (EndeavourOS to be precise), I get new Kernel updates all the time. That means every time a new Kernel version is installed, the Nvidia driver DKMS has to be installed too. And that is basically the slowest part. But that’s not too bad, even though it’s doing this twice for each Kernel I have once.
What’s more infuriating is, if you also happen to use Flatpaks for a very few applications. I really don’t have many Flatpaks at all. Yet, the Nvidia drivers are installed in 7 versions or what?! And they are full downloads, each 340 MB or more. This takes ages and is the only part that takes long to update Flatpak system. I always do flatpak remove --unused
to make sure nothing useless is present. /RANT (EDIT: Just typos corrected.)
And in addition to that, it’s the only thing that breaks on my system that isn’t my fault.
My next GPU will definitely be AMD unless Intel catches up very quickly.
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Same. Everything just works great out of the box.
I got both an AMD desktop and laptop GPU and I’ve had 0 issues with either. It’s been so refreshing.
I would have thought Intel would be decent on Linux. It falls behind on Windows because it doesn’t have all the years of broken game fixes baked into the drivers like AMD and nVidia have, but isn’t all the Linux gaming done through Vulkan wrappers around DirectX?
Intel has the best software support - AMD just has more powerful hardware and good enough software support
nvidia has the best hardware on paper, but no software support
A large number of games support Linux natively thanks to Valve’s pushes, and use OpenGL
DXVK (directx to vulkan) is one of the more popular translation layers for other games
Intel also uses DXVK on Windows to help with older versions of DirectX (primarily DX9 afaik) on their ARC cards
My embedded AMD GPU has been unusable under Ubuntu. Constant crashes/freezes. When trying to find a workaround (unsuccessfully), I found lots of other people with slight variations of the same problem - same symptoms, but different root causes… seems like at any time there are several system-breaking bugs and every time one is removed another is introduced. You just have to hope your kernel happens to be one that happens to work with your specific config.
My next platform will be Intel-based.
Which embeded gpu?
AMD works fine for me. I had a Thinkpad P14s for a while and my gaming computer uses a 6800 XT.
Same - Thinkpad X395 (R5 3500U) for casual use, RX 6750 XT for gaming, FirePro W4100 for work, and zero thinking about GPU drivers between the three.
Of you have a thousand year old laptop with an amd embedded you can have such problems. Don’t draw the wrong conclusions about current Amd.
It’s less than 3 years old. If it was any newer the argument would be “you can’t expect such new hardware to be supported”.
Just ubuntu or AMD APUs in general?
It works on Windows, no idea how other distros behave but judging by all the issues people were reporting, even if this specific issue doesn’t happen on other distros, you’ll get bitten by something else.
Can you use AMD CPU and Intel dGPU?
I run Pop_OS with a temperamental Nvidia GPU that is unstable at factory clock speeds, but solid when I reduce the power limit by 5-10%. The only recurring annoyance I have with pop is that the flatpak GreenWithEnvy breaks after every GPU driver update and requires a manual flatpak upgrade to fix.
Similarly for my work laptop also running pop on nvidia, the big frustration is again nvidia related. Battery life is poor since hybrid graphics doesn’t work and external displays only work with the discrete graphics card.
Hyped for the RX 7700/7800 XT, cuz they either replace my previous goal of a 4k capable card or bring down prices for the 6900/6950 XT a bit.