How is the NVIDIA driver situation on Linux these days? I built a new desktop with an AMD GPU since I didn't want to deal with all the weirdness of closed source or lacking/obsolete open source drivers.
I built my new-ish computer with an AMD GPU because I trusted in-kernel drivers better than out-of-kernel DKMS drivers.
That said, my previous experience with the DKMS driver stuff hasn't been bad. If you use Nvidia's proprietary driver stack, then things should generally be fine. The worst issues are that Nvidia has (historically, at least; it might be different for newer cards) refused to implement some graphics features that everybody else uses, which means that you basically need entirely separate codepaths for Nvidia in window managers, and some of them have basically said "fuck no" to doing that.
The current stable proprietary driver is a nightmare on Wayland with my 3070, constant flickering and stuttering everywhere. Apparently the upcoming version 555 is much better, I'm sticking with X11 until it comes out. I never tried the open-source one yet, not sure if it supports my GPU at all.
In defense of the parent, upcoming can still be a relative term, albeit a bit misleading. For example: I'm running the 550 drivers still because my upstream nixos-unstable doesn't have 555 for me yet.
I love NixOS, and the nvidia-x11 package is truly wonderful and captures so many options. But having such a complex package makes updating and regression testing take time. For ML stuff I ended up using it as the basis for an overlay, and ripping out literally everything I don’t need, which makes it a matter of minutes usually to make the changes requires to upgrade when a new driver is released I’m running completely headless because these are H100 nodes, and I just need persistenced and fabricmanager, and GDRMA (which wasn’t working at all, causing me to go down this rabbit hole of stripping everything away until I could figure out why).
I was going to say specialisations might be useful for you to keep a previous driver version around for testing but you might be past that point!
Having the ability to keep alternate configurations for $previous_kernel and $nvidia_stable have been super helpful in diagnosing instead of rolling back.
Version 555.58.02 is under “latest” in nixos-unstable as of about three weeks ago[1]. (Somebody should check with qyliss if she knows the PR tracker is dead... But the last nixos-unstable bump was two days ago, so it’s there.)
`nvidia-smi` shows that my driver version is 550.78. I ran `nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade` yesterday. My nixos channel is `nixos-unstable`.
Do you know something I don't? I'd love to be on the latest version.
I should have written my post better, it implies that 555 does not exist in nixpkgs, which I never meant. There's certainly a phrasing that captures what I'm seeing more accurately.
I did not mean to chastise you or anything, just to suggest you could be able to have a newer driver if you had missed the possibility.
The thing is, AFAIU, NVIDIA has several release channels for their Linux driver[1] and 555 is not (yet?) the "production" one, which is what NixOS defaults to (550 is). If you want a different degree of freshness for your NVIDIA driver, you need to say so explicitly[2]. The necessary incantation should be
This is somewhat similar to how you get a newer kernel by setting boot.kernelPackages to linuxPackages_latest, for example, if case you've ever done that.
I had this configuration but was lacking a flake update to move my nixpkgs forward despite the channel, which I can understand much better looking back.
Thanks for the additional info, this HM thread has helped me quite a bit.
I switched to Wayland 10 years ago when it became an option ok Fedora.
First thing I had to do was to drop NVIDIA and switch to Intel GPU, and past 5 years to AMD GPU.
Makes a big difference if the upstream kernel is supported.
Maybe NVIDIA drivers have kind of worked on 12 month old kernels that Ubuntu on average uses.
this is resolved in 555 (currently running 555.58.02). my asus zephyrus g15 w/ 3060 is looking real good on Fedora 40. there's still optimizations needed around clocking, power, and thermals. but the graphics presentation layer has no issues on wayland. that's with hybrid/optimus/prime switching, which has NEVER worked seamlessly for me on any laptop on linux going back to 2010. gnome window animations remain snappy and not glitchy while running a game. i'm getting 60fps+ running baldurs gate 3 @ 1440p on the low preset.
Had similar experience with my Legion 5i 3070 with Wayland and Nvidia 555, but my HDMI out is all screwed up now of course. Working on 550. One step forward and one step back.
I have two monitors connected to the 3070 and it works well. The only issue I had was suspending, the GPU would "fall of the bus" and not get its power back when the PC woke up. I had to add the kernel line "pcie_aspm=off" to prevent the GPU from falling asleep.
Huh. I’m using 2 monitors connected to a 4090 on Linux mint - which is still using X11. It works flawlessly, including DPI scaling. Wake from sleep is fine too.
I haven’t tried wayland yet. Sounds like it might be time soon given other comments in this thread.
I've literally never had an issue in decades of using NVIDIA and linux. They're closed source, but the drivers work very consistently for me. NVIDIA's just the only option if you want something actually good and to run ML workloads as well.
The problem with comments like this is that you never know if you will be me or you on your graphics card or laptop.
I have tried nvidia a few times and kept getting burnt. AMD just works. I don't get the fastest ML machine, but I am just a tinkerer there and OpenCL works fine for my little toy apps and my 7900XTX blazes through every wine game.
If you need it professionally than you need it, warts an all. For any casual user that 10% extra gaming performance needs to weighed against reliability.
A mechanic might say "This car has never given me a problem" because the mechanic doesn't consider cleaning an idle bypass circuit or adjusting valve clearances to be a "problem". To 99% percent of the population though, those are expensive and annoying problems because they have no idea what those words even mean, much less the ability to troubleshoot, diagnose, and repair.
a lot has probably to do with not really understanding their distributions package manager and lkms specifically, I also always suspected that most Linux users don't know if they are using Wayland or X11 and the issues they had were actually Wayland specific ones they wouldn't have with Nvidia/x11 and come to think of it, how would they even know if it's a GPU driver issue in the first place? Guess I'm the mechanic in your analogy.
When I run Gentoo or Arch, I know. But when I run Ubuntu or Fedora, should I have needed to know?
On plenty of distros "I want to install it and forget about is reasonable" and on both Gentoo and Ubuntu I have rebooted from a working system into a system where the display stopped working, at least on Gentoo I was ready because I broke it somehow.
Absolutely I once had an issue with kernel/user-space driver version mismatch in Ubuntu, trivial to fix and the kernel logs tell you what's wrong. But yeah I get that most users don't read their kernel logs and it shouldn't be an expectation to do so for normal users of linux. The experiences are just very different, it's why the car mechanic analogy fits so well.
I think it also got so much better over time, I've been using Linux since debian woody (22 years ago) the stuff you had to deal with back then heavily skews my perspective on what users today see as unacceptable brokenness in the Nvidia driver.
I've run NixOS for almost a decade now and I honestly would not recommend anything else. I've had many issues with booting on almost every distro. They're about as reliable as Windows in that regard. NixOS has been absolutely rock solid; beyond anything I could possibly have hoped for. In the extremely rare case my system would not boot, I've either found a hardware problem that would affect anyone, or I could just revert to a previous system revision and boot up. Never had any problem. No longer use anything else because it's just too risky
Your problem there is that both search engines place this image and backstory at the top of the results, so neither Google nor Bing agree with any of you.
If you think they're wrong, be sure to let them know.
What torvalds is complaining about is absolutely true, but the problem is that most users do not give a shit about those issues. Torvalds disagreement wasn't about bugs in-, or complains about the quality of the proprietary driver, he complained about nvidias lack of open source contributions and bad behavior towards the kernel developer community. But users don't care if they run a proprietary driver as long as it works (and it does work fine for most people).
So you see now why that's not very relevant to end-users experiences they were talking about?
Do you think Google and Bing are endorsing top results, and in particular endorsing a result like that in the specific context of what manufacturers I consider buying from?
That's the only way they would be disagreeing with me.
Torvalds has said nasty mean things to a lot of people in the past, and expressed regret over his temper & hyperbole. Try searching for something more recent https://youtu.be/wvQ0N56pW74
> AMD just works. I don't get the fastest ML machine, but I am just a tinkerer there and OpenCL works fine for my little toy apps and my 7900XTX blazes through every wine game.
That's the opposite of my experience. I'd love to support open-source. But the AMD experience is just too flaky, too card-dependent. NVidia is rock-solid (maybe not for Wayland, but I never wanted Wayland in the first place).
What kind of flakiness? The only AMD GPU problem I have had involved a lightning strike killing a card while I was gaming.
My nvidia problems are generally software and update related. The NVidia stuff usually works on popular distros, but as soon anything custom or a surprise update happens then there is a chance things break.
Black screens, X server crashes, OpenGL programs either crashing or running slow. Just general unreliability. Different driver versions seemed more reliable than others, which meant I was always very reluctant to upgrade, which then gives you more problems as you end up pinning old versions which then makes it harder to troubleshoot online...
> My nvidia problems are generally software and update related. The NVidia stuff usually works on popular distros, but as soon anything custom or a surprise update happens then there is a chance things break.
I mean if you run mixed versions then yeah that will work for some upgrades and not others. A decent package manager should prevent that; some distros refuse to put effort into packaging the nvidia-drivers out of principle. But if you keep the drivers in sync (which is what the official package from NVidia themselves does, it's not their fault some distros choose to explode it into multiple packages) and properly rebuild just the kernel module every time you do a kernel upgrade (or just reinstall the whole driver if you prefer), then it's rock solid.
Up to a couple of years ago, before permanently moving to AMD GPUs, I couldn't even boot Ubuntu with an Nvida GPU. This was because Ubuntu booted by default with Nouveau, which didn't support a few/several series (I had at least two different series).
The cards worked fine with binary drivers once the system was installed, but AFAIR, I had to integrate the binary driver packages in the Ubuntu ISO in order to boot.
I presume that now, the situation is much better, but necessiting binary drivers can be a problem in itself.
Me too. Now I have a laptop with discrete nvidia and an eGPU with 3090 in it, a desktop with 4090, another laptop with another discrete nvidia.. all switching combinations work, acceleration works, game performance is on par with windows (even with proton to within a small percentage or even sometimes better). All out of the box with stock Ubuntu and installing driver from Nvidia site.
The only "trick" is I'm still on X11 and probably will stay. Note that I did try wayland on few occasions but I steered away (mostly due to other issues with it at the time).
Yeah I once worked at a cloud gaming company that used Wine on Linux on NVIDIA to stream cloud games. They were the only real option for multi-game performance, and very rock solid in terms of uptime. I truly have no idea what people are talking about. Yes I use X11.
Wayland is even worse mess than it normally is. Used to flicker real bad before 555.58.02, less so with the latest driver - but still has some glitches with games. A bunch of older Electron apps still fail to render anything and require hardware acceleration disabled. I gave up trying to make it all work - can't get rid of all the flicker and drawing issues, plus Wayland seems to be a real pain in the ass with HiDPI displays.
X11 sort of works, but I had to entirely disable DPMS or one of my monitors never comes back online after going to sleep. I thought it was my KVM messing up, but that happened even with a direct connection... no idea what's going on there.
CUDA works fine, save for the regular version compatibility hiccups.
4070ti super here, X11 is fine, i have zero issues.
Wayland is mostly fine, though i get some windowframe glitches when maxing them to the monitor and a another issue that i'm pretty sure is wayland but it has obnly happened a couple of times and it locks the whole device up. I cant prove it yet.
I am not using Wayland and I do not have any intention to use it, therefore I do not care for any problems caused by Wayland not supporting NVIDIA and demanding that NVIDIA must support Wayland.
I am using only Linux or FreeBSD on all my laptop, desktop or server computers.
On desktop and server computers I did not ever have the slightest difficulty with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, either for OpenGL or for CUDA applications or for video decoding/encoding or for multiple monitor support, with high resolution and high color depth, on either Gentoo/Funtoo Linux or FreeBSD, during the last two decades. I also have AMD GPUs, which I use for compute applications (because they are older models, which still had FP64 support). For graphics applications they frequently had annoying bugs, unlike NVIDIA (however my AMD GPUs have been older models, preceding RDNA, which might be better supported by the open-source AMD drivers).
The only computers on which I had problems with NVIDIA on Linux were those laptops that used the NVIDIA Optimus method of coexistence with the Intel integrated GPUs. Many years ago I have needed a couple of days to properly configure the drivers and additional software so that the NVIDIA GPU was selected when desired, instead of the Intel iGPU. I do not know if any laptops with NVIDIA Optimus still exist. The laptops that I bought later had video outputs directly from the NVIDIA GPU, so there was no difference between them and desktops and the NVIDIA drivers worked flawlessly.
Both on Gentoo/Funtoo Linux and FreeBSD I never had to do anything else but to give the driver update command and everything worked fine. Moreover, NVIDIA has always provided a nice GUI application "NVIDIA X Server Settings", which provides a lot of useful information and which makes very easy any configuration tasks, like setting the desired positions of multiple monitors. A few years ago there was nothing equivalent for the AMD or Intel GPU drivers, but that might have changed meanwhile.
I got my nvidia 1060 back then during the crypto crysis when the price of AMD GPUs were inflated due to miners. Hesitant and scepital about Linux support, I upgraded the same machine with that GPU since 2016 von Ubuntu 14.04, to 18.04 and now 24.04 - without any nvidia driver issues anytime whatsoever. When I read about issues with nvidias drivers, it is mostly people with rare distro or rolling release ones, with changing kernel versions very frequently and failure to recompile with the binary drivers. For LTS distros you will likely have no issues.
My experience with an AMD iGPU on Linux was so bad that my next laptop will be Intel. Horrible instability to the point where I could reliably crash my machine by using Google Maps for a few minutes, on both Chrome and Firefox. It got fixed eventually - with the next Ubuntu release, so I had a computer where I was afraid to use anything with WebGL for half a year.
Depends on the version of drivers: 550 version results into black screen (you have to kill and restart X server) after waking up from sleep. 535 version doesn't have this bug. Don't know about 555.
Also tearing is a bitch. Still. Even with ForceCompositionPipeline.
I've been running Arch with KDE under Wayland on two different laptops both with NVIDIA GPUs using proprietary drivers for years and have not run into issues. Maybe I'm lucky? It's been flawless for me.
The experiences always vary quite a lot, it depends so much on what you do with it. For example discord doesn't support screen sharing with Wayland, it's just one small example but those can add up over time. Another example is display rotation which was broken in kde for a long time (recently fixed).
I have never had an issue with them. That said I typically go mid range on cards so they are usually hardened architecture due to a year or two of being in the high end.
plug, install then play, I got 3 different Nvidia GPU sets and all running without any issue, nothing crazy to do but follow installation instructions.
