Comment by MangoToupe
1 month ago
> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things.
Crazy—it used to be that nvidia drivers were by far the least stable parts of an install, and nouveau was a giant leap forward. Good to know their software reputation has improved somewhat
Nouveau has never been good for gaming. Not their fault (they had to reverse engineer everything), but it was only really ever viable for mostly 2D desktops in my experience.
Sure, but nvidia has always been seen as a liability for basic operation of the computer. Their driver quality is notoriously as bad as it gets. Nouveau fixed this.
I keep hearing people assert this but I've been using nvidia drivers on Linux for 25 years and aside from the pain of getting them installed, they have always just worked with no issues at all.
Whereas every time I install Debian fresh and temporarily get the Nouveau drivers temporarily, basic desktop graphics are slow (no hardware acceleration) and crash-prone.
NVIDIA on Linux is a pain, either path.
Whereas, AMD just works and is thus standard recommendation.
Everyone says this but it is not my experience at all. Every time I try AMD cards I run into weird problems. The Nvidia drivers are a pain to install and tend to break randomly on kernel updates, but once built properly they always just work for me...
Did you use the proprietary AMD drivers? You need to use the open source drivers. As far as I know these should be the default on all distros, so just click through the OS installer, install Steam, and start gaming. Don't touch the drivers.
2 replies →
This has been my experience too, when I upgraded my GPU, I wanted to switch to Linux full time, so I went with AMD because everywhere people kept saying NVIDIA GPUs had a lot of issues, but it turned out to be the opposite. With my old card, I just have to install the proprietary NVIDIA driver, zero issues.
I think people are still clinging onto old "wisdom" that hasn't be true for decades, like "updating breaks Arch", go figure.
I used an Nvidia card for about a year, and I did get it working for the most part, but there was definitely some glitchiness I don't encounter with AMD.
For example, I use the Gamescope/Tenfoot interface on my system, and the actual menu for that is extremely glitchy on Nvidia drivers. On AMD it's absolutely perfect (I suspect because Valve develops this interface around an AMD card).
> but once built properly they always just work for me
If you figure out how to reliably do this, you're a rich man