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To be fair the windows driver situation isn’t much better. last time I started windows on a computer I cared about, it tried to find a new driver for my mouse for some reason and in the process deleted all the profiles I had configured on the mouse
Mouse drivers are ridiculous. Over 1 GB for just a freaking mouse driver.
My solution was to pick a distro that came with Nvidia drivers set up already (pop os) and have had zero problems with it.
Me too, Bazzite. That doesn’t solve that it runs 15-25% slower than windows in heavy games. Thank god I play mostly indie games.
That doesn’t improve the quality of the drivers though… But you seem to not have had issues yet… Are you on wayland though?
There’s always a new issue. One time I can’t resume of suspending (I think this is still an issue…). Then shutting off a monitor leads to a crash of the driver-stack. I could go on. Just the fact that Nvidia took so long to support GBM properly is a tragedy.
No not on wayland as one of my monitors does not behave with the existing options.
It doesn’t fix the drivers but for many the installation and set up is where things go wrong. That’s how it was for me.
So you haven’t had “zero” problems. AFAIK wayland is already usable with AMD since almost a decade or so… (well not every program was supported yet a decade ago obviously, but, at least these kind of issues that Nvidia has/had are non-existing AFAIK).
It doesn’t fix the drivers but for many the installation and set up is where things go wrong. That’s how it was for me.
For me it was never the installation, just the risk after updating the drivers that yet another issue appears (sometimes old ones were fixed though, to be fair).
YOTLD won’t ever happen, but getting NVIDIA drivers in order for seamless experience will definitely increase user base. It might only happen when Nova/Nouveau+NVK are mature enough to take over.
It’s happening now tbh. More people across the experience spectrum than ever before are using linux. I’m loving it
I’m not saying the market won’t grow, yes, there’s a lot of traction lately, but it’s blown out of proportions within the Linux bubble. I still don’t see mass adoption and everyone switching over from windows just yet. Especially not within a single year. Perhaps 2030s will be the decade of the Linux on desktop, who knows.
The Year of the Linux Desktop isn’t literally when it gains 50%+ marketshare, it’s the point in the adoption S curve where it’s moved past early adopters and enthusiasts and is starting to be picked up by mainstream users.
That’s literally happening now. 2025/26. It’s happened. (Past tense).
Now we’re in the “watch numbers go up” phase of the S curve, wondering when the second derivative will go negative, as that will signal peak adoption speed.
I’m on endeavouros (arch) with an rtx 3060 and haven’t had any issues whatsoever in a few years, are people having more nvidia problems lately or something?
I believe I have the same GPU but the Ti version (I might be mistaken but it’s definitely 30xx ti) and I couldn’t get it to work on mint smoothly myself. Put my 7600 back in. Idk if it’s the distro or not. Followed instructions online and nothing worked. Maybe I was simply missing something simple but whatever the fix is isn’t intuitive for me.
Just to note: that I’ve only been using Linux for about a year now and have been learning as I go. I’m not a CS student or anything. Just a dude without a diploma working a blue collar job.
It’s a mixed bag, most of the time the desktop cards work fine, but mobile gpus are a little more wonky. Had a desktop rtx 2070 super under endeavoros as well until the last 6 months (even on the sway community edition, which is wayland based), but I have to admit the rx 9070xt that replaced it was much easier to setup and get going with no fuss thus far (plus really easy to undervolt, so I don’t use a ton of power as well).
Don’t know about ‘recently’, but I bought a new PC about 2 years ago with a 4070 super, spent about one and a half days trying to get Ubuntu to properly set up drivers, and ended up installing windows instead.
(Due to ongoing enshittification I am considering giving it another go with mint)
If you want a just works solution for gaming, try bazzite. I Never had a single hitch
Bazzite or Pop OS. Ubuntu and Mint are not railored for gaming much. You can still play games of coruse, but you will have more better experience on gaming-specific OSes.
I would recommend endevour OS which is based on arch, so you have the latest drivers and kernel always. Ubuntu is always old and may not work properly. Try that one and things will likely just work out of the box.
I can recommend bazzite if you don’t want to tinker much. Install took like half an hour and my 4090 worked out of the box with all games that I tried so far. (Mostly WoW, bg3 and rematch)
Even for tinkering, check out bistrobox that comes installed with it. Stupid simple to just run a Debian (or whatever) container for packages that expect a mutable os
deleted by creator
Welcome to the Democratic Church of America.
Maybe Microslop is secretly paying Nvidia to be shit specifically on Linux?
Doesn’t even have to pay. With the way Microsoft pushes AI, Nvidia gets their share automatically.
Its been such a ballache getting games developed on Unity to run on my 3080 on Mint. I hate having to dual boot into windows to play them but most of the time that’s the only realistic option I’m left with.
Please explain.
Why are the drivers shitty if they are doing an amazing job protecting? Not sure from what though?
Protecting windows users from the year of the linux desktop?
The drivers being shitty on linux is protecting windows from mass abandonment
Protecting microsoft from the year of the linux desktop is the intended meaning.
I had issue with Nvidia and also with a Realtek PCIe RTL8125, windows work like a charm with the same configuration. Even if I preefer Linux I had to move back for stability.
I managed to get hibernate working on opensuse with an Nvidia card, so I guess I’m lucky as hell.
No you fucking didn’t.
I had to remember that I’m trans and furry and channel that energy during drive partitioning.
There are limits to a furrys power
Call me Icarus baby
No way I’m configuring that. It needs to position the same amount of space as your ram amount right?
I’ll just sleep or turn it off.
I made a dedicated hibernate partition on nvram, and gave it enough space for my cpu RAM and the DRAM, plus like ten percent. In the opensuse setup you give it a particular name, then you look up the right kernel config parameter and boom done.
This is even with the Nvidia drivers.
I was shocked too. I decided to that that after faffing around trying to get sleep working. 😄
ugh even worse if you have a hybrid laptop. integrated amd and discrete nvidia.
Kids, learn from me, do NOT buy an ASUS ROG Strix. less than 5 years old and thing is already on its deathbed with constant reboots and hanging at POST.
I have one of those, and my solution was to permanently disable the Nvidia card in favor of integrated graphics. Yeah…
I’ll do you one better: do not buy ANYTHING made by Asus. That stuff’s built to fail as fast as possible.
As a single data point to the contrary, I’ve been an ASUS guy for 15 years and always recommend to friends and family. I have an ROG Ally, all my Mboards are ASUS, same with my networking gear. I have an ASUS monitor from 2010 that my Dad still uses.
They provide more settings to tweak out of the box than most of the other tech companies in the same price range.
So far i’ve always had good luck with their motherboards, granted those are the only things from asus that i’ve bought, and my current motherboard is from 2019 i think.
yeah I learned that first hand. shit company with shit product.
I don’t think that is a function of the nvidia GPU save that ANY discrete GPU will cause increased wear on battery and heat. Also something that starts out with 6 hours battery and now has 2 is a lot less useful than something which had 10 and now has 6.
Yes I have the same on my laptop from work. It’s a Lenovo with integrated AMD, but also dedicated Nvidia for certain engineering applications that don’t play nice with integrated AMD.
Work doesn’t allow me to install Linux on the thing and some of the applications we use for work don’t run under Linux anyways. But I investigated if it would be possible, so I could decide to go pester IT asking if I could. I researched and found the same answer everywhere, it’s a pain in the ass and nothing but trouble. The main workaround is to completely disable the Nvidia chip, which obviously means not having access to that performance if required.
Would be really nice if this somewhat common use case could just work out of the box.
it is an absolute pain and honestly I wouldn’t waste your time. Wayland stuff you’ll be fine. X11? nope. And yes honestly completely disabling the discrete Nvidia GPU is the best option but depending on the distro that can also be a pain OR if your laptops BIOS ain’t shit (Asus ROG Bios IS shit) you can disable it there. or like on Arch you just pretend the thing doesn’t exist and don’t even bother installing anything for it.
Yeah hybrid laptops are a pain in the ass. don’t do it. just don’t.
Can you not just fully disabled the integrated? (At the cost of higher power usage.)
Most hybrid laptops (AFAIK) have the integrated graphics hard wired to the drive the display, since its always on
ProArt here with AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU. Zero issues on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Just upgraded yesterday.
Oh, they fixed the recent nvidia driver issues? Should check
My Nvidia driver has worked flawlessly in Fedora for the past 3 years. Not a single issue.
I’m on nobara and it’s generally fine, until I try to plug in my TV via hdmi to game or watch tv from the bed. Idk if it’s just that TV, or if it’s having 3 displays, or even just mixing DP and HDMI, but it flips its shit when I do that. I plan to troubleshoot at some point when I’m not in such a cramped space.
Had nvidia spectacularly fail on Fedora
The people who are yapping about this kind of stuff literally haven’t even looked around or explored any of the options. Nvid drivers running flawlessly for years.
I’ve tried 6 different distros on my pc with nvidia graphics and none of them worked the way they shoudl have.
What distros have you actually tried? And what does “not working like they should have” actually mean?
I tried Fedora, Debian, Bazzite, Nobara, CachyOS and some others I cannot recall. Not working ranged from jot being able to get through initial setup (fedora after install), not being able to install at all, unexplained graphical glitches everywhere and performance under any kind of load being worse than playing on a laptop.
I’ve used nearly every one of those distros and I’ve never had problems. Based on what you’re describing, it doesn’t sound like problems that exist inside the driver. Best of luck to you.
Sure bro, all the endless people having issues with those shitty drivers are at fault. Nvidia is making a whole new driver because they just love to do it, not because the old one is a huge mess.
I’m doing my best helping family and friends with these things on various distros, but by now they all moved over to AMD or Intel or are in the process of it; even swapping out RTX 3000 series cards because the driver keeps fucking up and the Wayland support is a hot mess. Every single time the constant issues and glitches vanished once the Nvidia was thrown out. Nvidia on Linux is just hot garbage.
I mean, if there are working drivers that don’t have issues, and you’re using those that do, it’s not entirely your fault, but also it’s your fault.
mate one issue is the one installed by default on many distros is wrong, the idea that the average person is going to be able to run horrible commands to rip the kernel drivers back out again and force install a version that isn’t the one recommended by the repo (which is what I had to do to get mine working) is simply ridiculous. THAT is not a user’s fault.
There are graphical interfaces for it if you’re afraid of letters on the screen. You’re making it sound like it’s some kind of impossible ordeal, but even in shit distros (looking at you, Ubuntu) it’s just pressing checkboxes (or, OH HORROR, copy-pasting words in the terminal, I’m shaking even thinking about it right now).
And yeah, it’s nvidia’s fault for making shit drivers, and distros’ mainterner’s fault for choosing shit drivers to be included, but since good versions of the drivers exist, you gotta take some responsibility for not using them.
if there are working drivers that don’t have issues
There aren’t. Some distros come with Nouveau alone, which is often awfully slow or lags behind in support for new cards. Some by now ship with nouveau + NVK, which is still unsuitable for demanding tasks and has bugs as NVK is still beta. And some ship with the proprietary Nvidia driver which is a hot mess. Changing something about this usually ends up in a mess due to how the Nvidia driver has to install itself into the system every time an update runs, and the fact you have to basically rip out a kernel module for it (nouveau).
Lmao this is absolutely false, and the fact that you think this means you’re either hilariously misinformed, actively sticking your head in the sand, or outright lying.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
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 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.
No, they work just fine for me on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. They load and compile in updates and that’s all there is.
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
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.
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)
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…
No.
Upgraded to an AMD card and suddenly Linux became perfectly reliable.
Still has an issue with HDMI speed since HDMI is a proprietary spec and they don’t allow 2.1 in open source drivers so it’s stuck on 2.0 speed. Displayport is very good though.
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.
Same. Hopefully AMD still bothers making GPU with…is it 1% market share while Intel gave up entirely again? Dire.
No issues on Mint though