The compute part of Nvidia’s proprietary driver stack is fine. That is what they historically have been putting their resources and effort towards, since their big customers only care about compute.
The graphics part of the stack is where the problems are.
Up until Wayland, they were bypassing the kernel’s standard GPU initialization path and using their X server implementation to do everything instead.
As far as gaming goes, is is unable to utilize the graphics hardware as efficiently as on Windows. More time is spent stalling/blocking, as evidenced by lower power draw and performance.
Their QA is awful. There was an issue with GTK 4 apps freezing when closed. They fixed it, and then the next driver release reintroduced it.
Their transparency and community involvement outside of the kernel mailing lists is also pretty poor. They read peoples’ bugs reports and feature requests on their forums, but they rarely acknowledge them or give status updates.
Ooh thank you for elaborating. I hope that the opening of their drivers would solve some of those issues. And we can finally have things working nicely
In addition to that other answer: they are bad at maintaining their userspace tools. The basic nvidia-setup program was at times so broken that you could only change stuff as root because using su or sudo crashed the app. Which is fun if your root account is deactivated by default… And they couldn’t be bothered to fix it for literally more than a year.
I still have a script in my files that was running in early boot to change the fan speed at boot because there was no other way to change configs once booted and logged in.
Interesting, I feel like I avoided a lot of these issues as I had laptops and so had to use the nvidia prime instead to manually offload to the gpu when needed.
Just needed it to have the drivers or dkms. I probably had a worse time perf wise but wouldn’t know.
Everyone on earth already uses DKMS for this installing a new kernel or driver triggers a rebuild.
The common fails are
User has neither disabled secure boot nor set it up to accept to sign with a key your motherboard is configured to accept.
You MUST do one or the other
User is using very new kernel with very old hardware. Support window is about 10 years for mainline. Legacy for 1-3 years. Beyond 11-13 years you are either using old kernels or third party patches.
Ex: Geforce 600 series from 2012 is stuck with nvidia driver version 470.x latest release 2024. Attempting to build against recent kernels released after 2024 may not work without patches but MAY work with up to 7.0 as of this message. See
Y’all I would happily take all yalls nvidia GPUs.
(Slackware has made using nvidia drivers easy for so long now I’m surprised the other distros haven’t fucking figured it out.)
The problem is not “using the drivers”. It’s the driver quality.
Elaborate? Cause I can use the nvidia GPGPU stuff so much easier than amd and their fucked rocm (I want that to succeed so bad)
The compute part of Nvidia’s proprietary driver stack is fine. That is what they historically have been putting their resources and effort towards, since their big customers only care about compute.
The graphics part of the stack is where the problems are.
Their transparency and community involvement outside of the kernel mailing lists is also pretty poor. They read peoples’ bugs reports and feature requests on their forums, but they rarely acknowledge them or give status updates.
Ooh thank you for elaborating. I hope that the opening of their drivers would solve some of those issues. And we can finally have things working nicely
In addition to that other answer: they are bad at maintaining their userspace tools. The basic nvidia-setup program was at times so broken that you could only change stuff as root because using su or sudo crashed the app. Which is fun if your root account is deactivated by default… And they couldn’t be bothered to fix it for literally more than a year.
I still have a script in my files that was running in early boot to change the fan speed at boot because there was no other way to change configs once booted and logged in.
Interesting, I feel like I avoided a lot of these issues as I had laptops and so had to use the nvidia prime instead to manually offload to the gpu when needed.
Just needed it to have the drivers or dkms. I probably had a worse time perf wise but wouldn’t know.
Every distro makes this easy. Every single one. Some have to enable a separate repo for all proprietary shit which is the limit of the challenge.
But kernel upgrades? That’s where I’ve broken mine and gave up
Everyone on earth already uses DKMS for this installing a new kernel or driver triggers a rebuild.
The common fails are
You MUST do one or the other
Ex: Geforce 600 series from 2012 is stuck with nvidia driver version 470.x latest release 2024. Attempting to build against recent kernels released after 2024 may not work without patches but MAY work with up to 7.0 as of this message. See
https://github.com/joanbm/nvidia-470xx-linux-mainline