Comment by anschl
17 hours ago
People say you will have less problems with AMD but I am using a Nvidia GPU for years now (on Cachyos and Pop OS) without issues. I'm using Steam and Proton pretty much exclusively though.
17 hours ago
People say you will have less problems with AMD but I am using a Nvidia GPU for years now (on Cachyos and Pop OS) without issues. I'm using Steam and Proton pretty much exclusively though.
Which card and which drivers? I switched from Windows 10 to Xubuntu last year and have had endless issues with my Nvidia card (GTX 970). At the moment, I can't even use the desktop without annoying flickering & hard to diagnose / fix bugs.
Its an old card so I have no idea why I'm still struggling to get it to work. Is it perhaps because I'm using Xfce? I heard that Nvidia cards play better with Wayland although I haven't tested this myself.
I run a GTX 970 on Fedora 44 KDE Plasma (Wayland) without issues. Make sure to use the 580.xx Nvidia driver.
Anything between 700 and 2000 series (inclusive) is in this "completely proprietary due to signed firmware but also not fully supported in Wayland" zone. You need to have at least 3000 series to have proprietary drivers with open kernel driver and good KMS/GBM/Wayland support.
I can't speak for the parent but I have a 5090 and it works perfectly fine
Nvidia on desktop has been mostly fine, if not rock solid, on the happy path they provide.
But their happy path hasn't included proper wayland support for a long time.
Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here
Nvidia on laptops is fine. There was a time that it was really difficult and the easiest route to success was to disable the Intel iGPU, and force Nvidia GPU to handle everything in BIOS. That hasn't been the case for a while, and you can even get nice desktop environment integration to let you choose which GPU to run a program with.
> Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here
I have an RTX 5070 (whatever the laptop variant is) and it absolutely rocks with almost everything I throw at it, running Ubuntu+Steam+Proton. I no longer worry whether a Windows game is going to run, because almost all of them do with good performance.
I think things might have changed in the last 6-7 years? That's when I switched away from Nvidia.
Or does your laptop have no other igpu?
My last Nvidia laptop was a Hybrid optimus laptop. I almost always ran it on the built in Intel igpu because of the really bad issues with the Nvidia cards. Video tearing, bad power management etc... I remember even switching the GPU wasn't easy... And performance wasn't as good either ..
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