Rant about Nvidia related updates on Linux
Rant about Nvidia related updates on Linux
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.)
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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.
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?
I don't get why people bringing up AMD issues always get down voted. The bias is real. I too am getting constant freezes with my Radeon 680M that have gone unresolved for almost a year.
Quite a few people are experiencing this so it isn't an isolated issue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/2220
A few reasons. It's received wisdom that AMD are the good guys because in the Intel / AMD slog they are the underdogs fighting the good fight and bringing good affordable products to all vs intel who has historically behaved in a sleazy underhanded and anti-competitive fashion and when they bought ATi they moved ATi from a maker of shitty proprietary poorly supported pieces of shit to an open source friendly maker of acceptable GPUS.
Since Nvidia is the bad guy in that fight it would be handy if Nvidia was also badly supported buggy, inferior. The fact that Nvidia is actually more stable, well supported, and generally better is somewhat a fly in the ointment.
It's especially humorous when its coming from users of a permanent beta distro like arch where the kernel update process is that the new kernel is pushed extremely quickly after release. Expert arch users realize that means they are their own QA as far as out of tree modules. Actually stable distros express what is known to work as dependencies such that you trivially get something that is known to work when you press go. They also don't run the kernel release that was cut this morning.
Meanwhile users of arch derived distros, who may or may not claim to be running arch while believing their distro is ubuntu with faster updates yell that nvidia is broken when 6.3 doesn't work the day it was cut with nvidia using a driver that doesn't claim to support 6.3. The fact that this dependency is known but not encoded into arch packages isn't an Nvidia problem.
Even Manjaro a distro run by folks who once told their users to set their clocks back because they forgot to renew their SSL Cert figured out they can avoid almost as much trouble as smart people can avoid by actually reading by just being lazy and not pulling changes instantly.
I love this comment! Yeah it's true, I'm the arch linux user you're describing! So is there a good middle ground according to you? Where we can have faster updates, high application support and high customization without the downsides of arch that you describe?
I am actually running Arch and have had very little issues with Nvidia, but plenty with my AMD GPUs.
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".
There's been a long standing amdgpu bug over the past year, there is a Kernel flag that fixes it mostly. Haven't had issues since the latest mesa and adding this flag. (RDNA3)
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?
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.
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.
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