Comment by duttish
20 hours ago
I've been on Linux desktop for ages, but it's not quite stable enough that I can recommend it to anyone. Space Marine 2 was the first game in quite a while than didn't just work out of the box, but...
E.g three weeks ago nvidia pushed bad drivers which broke my desktop after a reboot and I had to swap display (ctrl-alt-f3 etc), I never got into gnome at all, and roll back to an earlier version. Automatic rollback of bad drivers would have saved this.
Are Radeon drivers less shit?
It might depend on the distro, but were you running a 10 series or earlier? They dropped Pascal and earlier CPUs with the v590 driver, I know Arch migrated what the nvidia package installed in such a way that could leave someone without an appropriate driver unless they manually moved to a different source.
Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1prm8rl/archanno...
I'm on bog standard Ubuntu (25.04 maybe?) because it's what I know and I don't really care about it as long as it works. Which... well, seems above :}
I've had mixed experiences with AMD. Back in the day - a bit after Linus told Nvidia to fuck off - I tried to get my Radeon 5850HD (i think?) working on Ubuntu. It was one of those things I spent the whole weekend (OS reinstalls really add up) trying to make work, to no avail. Relative to that nonsense, the equivalent proprietary Nvidia driver just worked after being installed.
A couple of months ago I bought a second hand RX 7800 XT, and prepared myself for a painful experience, but I think it just worked. Like I got frustrated trying to find out how to download and install the driver, when I think it just came with Linux Mint already.
I've been using a full amd build with arch on it for years now. never had graphics related issues after an update. my biggest gripe is with the hdmi organization and how we can't have proper support with open source drivers.