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
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.
@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)
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.
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”.
Yes I switched to bazzite on by gaming PC for that reason. Works really well and I can always play my games without that fear, or the annoyance of windows. I always recommend bazzite to new users for this reason.
I’m not a big gamer (and factorio doesn’t have the full screen issue) so I still use mint, but I’m gradually switching to nixos. Works better… If you add the correct config for game scope and the rest (easily found on the wiki)
As a nix os user, I would recommend it if you are actually willing to learn the config language. It will be hard. And 2 months into actually making nix os my main machine, I still have no intuition with how to edit the config more than “copy paste this file, add the new code, import”.
Is it worth it? Ehh… I just like how I can actually know what’s installed and not forget a 30 GB app I never use is still there
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.
I wouldn’t say my setup is that unusual: two monitors and a nvidia GPU from the 2010s. But I am stuck on Ubuntu 24.04 because it still has xorg – my graphics card is not supported well on Wayland. I actually downgraded from 25.10 back to 24.04 to solve some wild display lag problems.
Minor lingering issues like DP displays not consistently waking up after sleep without a hard power cycle, VRR and HDR being essentially unsupported, and basic driver functions like frame rate limits not working?
Running Debian 13 with a 3060ti with Nvidia drivers, 3 monitors mixed DP and HDMI, and as far as I can tell those all work just fine. Save for the VRR, I haven’t tested that at all.
Mixing DP and HDMI works, using DP only causes issues with resume from suspend.
This is my main problem with these “Nvidia is fine on Linux posts”. People have something work in their specific setup, and assume it works in all setups, and that just isn’t true.
I’m not assuming it works in all setups. If people only talk about things that don’t work though, it doesn’t help move people to Linux. I’ve got a feeling that like with much of anything, the problems seemingly are overblown because those who aren’t having problems don’t have a reason to say so.
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.
It’s been a few years but I can see if I can find the old links. I still remember that you got some “Display undefined error” then a crash when running sudo nvidia-settings.
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’m gaming on grandpa Debian using nVidia’s CUDA repository for driver updates and I’m sitting fat and happy. Ignore instructions to install kernel headers for your specific kernel and just use the linux-headers-amd64 meta-package and it will automatically install new headers when the kernel updates. DKMS will rebuild the nvidia module for the new kernel and now kernel and nvidia driver updates are seamless. Performance is not noticeably different from when I was on Windows.
The only improvement at this point would be kernel-level integration like AMD has so I don’t need to add a repository, but aside from that I honestly don’t see room for improvement.
I had a problem on my work laptop with them about five years ago, but rolling back fixed it. Never on my personal machines.
Edit:
TBF, I’ve never had a personal laptop with an nVidia card. I generally prefer to build my own desktops, though I do have a laptop. It has an AMD GPU, also with no problems.
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’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.
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.
nah i used mint for years with nvidia, it got good at least a couple years ago. i still have a thinkpad with nvidia running ultramarine, and i haven’t thought about the drivers even once after installing.
on the dumber side of the fence, sister was complaining about nvidia drivers being shitty on winslop, now she switched to amd and the drivers are way shittier.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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)
Am I the only one who has no problems with Nvidia drivers?
But performance according to benchmarks is much worse than on windows.
In AMD case it is higher on Linux if you exclude RT
I remember reading somewhere (but I can’t find it now) that they were working on that with incremental improvements in each release.
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.
Also, lots of users use Linux on older devices, where the proprietary nvidia driver has dropped support, so the issues persist.
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.
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
Imo back in the days amd wasn’t any better
It was actually worse until they open sourced their drivers.
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.
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.)
@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)
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.
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”.
Yes I switched to bazzite on by gaming PC for that reason. Works really well and I can always play my games without that fear, or the annoyance of windows. I always recommend bazzite to new users for this reason.
Fedora works really well on my laptop tho
I’m not a big gamer (and factorio doesn’t have the full screen issue) so I still use mint, but I’m gradually switching to nixos. Works better… If you add the correct config for game scope and the rest (easily found on the wiki)
I’m still at least a year away from falling down the nixos rabbit hole, but I can hear it calling to me. Good luck tho
As a nix os user, I would recommend it if you are actually willing to learn the config language. It will be hard. And 2 months into actually making nix os my main machine, I still have no intuition with how to edit the config more than “copy paste this file, add the new code, import”.
Is it worth it? Ehh… I just like how I can actually know what’s installed and not forget a 30 GB app I never use is still there
Yeah I’ve experienced the nobara issue a few times
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.
I wouldn’t say my setup is that unusual: two monitors and a nvidia GPU from the 2010s. But I am stuck on Ubuntu 24.04 because it still has xorg – my graphics card is not supported well on Wayland. I actually downgraded from 25.10 back to 24.04 to solve some wild display lag problems.
Minor lingering issues like DP displays not consistently waking up after sleep without a hard power cycle, VRR and HDR being essentially unsupported, and basic driver functions like frame rate limits not working?
Your average users might notice some of that…
Running Debian 13 with a 3060ti with Nvidia drivers, 3 monitors mixed DP and HDMI, and as far as I can tell those all work just fine. Save for the VRR, I haven’t tested that at all.
Mixing DP and HDMI works, using DP only causes issues with resume from suspend.
This is my main problem with these “Nvidia is fine on Linux posts”. People have something work in their specific setup, and assume it works in all setups, and that just isn’t true.
I’m not assuming it works in all setups. If people only talk about things that don’t work though, it doesn’t help move people to Linux. I’ve got a feeling that like with much of anything, the problems seemingly are overblown because those who aren’t having problems don’t have a reason to say so.
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.
Can you link us to the bug thread?
It’s been a few years but I can see if I can find the old links. I still remember that you got some “Display undefined error” then a crash when running sudo nvidia-settings.
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’m gaming on grandpa Debian using nVidia’s CUDA repository for driver updates and I’m sitting fat and happy. Ignore instructions to install kernel headers for your specific kernel and just use the
linux-headers-amd64meta-package and it will automatically install new headers when the kernel updates. DKMS will rebuild the nvidia module for the new kernel and now kernel and nvidia driver updates are seamless. Performance is not noticeably different from when I was on Windows.The only improvement at this point would be kernel-level integration like AMD has so I don’t need to add a repository, but aside from that I honestly don’t see room for improvement.
I had a problem on my work laptop with them about five years ago, but rolling back fixed it. Never on my personal machines.
Edit: TBF, I’ve never had a personal laptop with an nVidia card. I generally prefer to build my own desktops, though I do have a laptop. It has an AMD GPU, also with no problems.
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’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.
I’ve got a really old one, a 1060 or 1070 I forgot. Zero issues
It’s the 1060. They still work, I’ve got one in my server, but I couldn’t get mine to run with recent drivers.
No, they work just fine for me on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. They load and compile in updates and that’s all there is.
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.
No issues here either, I screwed up a driver update leaving Debian repos to actual Nvidia repos but other than that no issues
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.
nah i used mint for years with nvidia, it got good at least a couple years ago. i still have a thinkpad with nvidia running ultramarine, and i haven’t thought about the drivers even once after installing.
on the dumber side of the fence, sister was complaining about nvidia drivers being shitty on winslop, now she switched to amd and the drivers are way shittier.
funny how it turned this way.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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)
No.