Comment by Osiris
4 years ago
Disagree with Linux. I make an LVM snapshot before making any attempts to upgrade the graphics driver. It's a disaster. And don't say proprietary code, that's beside the point. Windows runs drivers in a way that one that crashes can be restarted without bringing down the kernel or the whole system.
FYI I've had the issue you describe half a dozen times with CentOS but literally never with Arch Linux (on both machines with similar nVidia cards, using the proprietary driver). In general I'm pretty impressed with Arch's package quality, I seldom encounter any issue and when I do it's patched very quickly.
I tried Arch Linux in a dual boot scenario on this System76 laptop and I don't recall why I switched back... I think it's because I tried to upgrade the graphics driver and got into state where I couldn't get X to run at all.
A co-worker keeps telling me to try Manjaro. I'm just not sure if I want to spend a weekend reinstalling all the stuff I use.
Very true. I have used Ubuntu and Fedora for a while, but when I switched to Arch, I never go back. Arch is described as bleeding edge, but another way to put it is it always has latest software, which is what a dev machine should be. My experience with installing Nvidia driver in ubuntu is nightmare. Tried official repo then failed, and tried different ppa and then failed again and again. At last, I found that I have an older kernel version and I need to compiled a latest kernel which is not in official ubuntu repo. I gave up at this point because I don't want to compile kernel every time I need to upgrade. With Arch, you always get the latest kernel and you won't usually missing feature from using an old LTS kernel.
My windows box has crashed over a dozen times in the past few years because of GPU driver issues with nvidia and amd