I'll give you a few examples.

- Ubuntu 18 I had hit or miss with the hdmi connection on my laptop (1060Q). 20% of the time it would work if I plugged it in. 50% of the time it would work if I had it plugged in and rebooted. This makes giving presentations difficult.

- Arch/Manjaro/Fedora/Ubuntu 16 I could never get the hdmi connection working for a laptop.

- All distros, difficulty getting cuda running AND using the display. Intel drivers for display + nvidia for cuda works, but this means I can't use my GPU when I want to do some of the limited linux gaming.

Laptops seem to have more problems than desktops. On desktops I have many more hits than misses (if I have the graphics card installed when I install the OS). Laptops have just been terrible.

The market for gpus in Linux laptops is vanishingly small compared to the market in Linux server.

Most of the people driving server gpu purchases are used to sucking it up and doing their work over ssh, instead of locally.

This is largely the fault of nvidia's optimus setup. They're starting to support it finally but it's still iffy

They mostly work most of the time. When people say they want something that "just works", they are looking for more consistency than that.

I don't doubt that they work for you, but not everyone is so lucky. I have encountered serious reliability issues with their drivers.

The headache with Nvidia drivers and Linux is that depending on how new your model is and what distro you're using, you may or may not be able to load the GUI until you've manually upgraded kernel and disabled the Nouveau drivers (if enabled) then updated to latest nvidia-drivers-XXX package.

I tried to get Ubuntu/Pop_OS! 20.04 running on a dual-GPU laptop that has an RTX-2060 and AMD Renoir integrated. Had to modify kernel boot params to disable nouveau modeset and then run script for mainline kernel upgrade + drivers to get it to run. Was not a fun Saturday =/

But prior to this, yeah Nvidia non-open source drivers have mostly "just worked" for me on the older models.

Usually, the best solution to putting Linux on a dual-GPU nvidia laptop is to stop doing it and go do something else.

That something else is to use an eGPU if you need to, or to buy a desktop.

I mean, the constraints of a laptop and a desktop are as different as that of a car and a plane.

Laptops with dual-GPUs are as efficient as both as those car-plane convertibles.

Is that common to have dual-GPUs in a laptop?

Seems unnecessary to have dual-GPUs, and crazy to have both Nvidia and AMD in the one laptop.

Most laptops with any Nvidia hardware have two GPUs, one less power-hungry GPU integrated into the CPU and one dedicated GPU to play games on when you're connected to/sitting nearby a power outlet.

As good as the performance of mobile GPUs is these days, they still suck up a lot of power. I don't think you'll get much work done on the go with a laptop that only has a dedicated AMD/Nvidia GPU.

One power hungry / hot one for gaming, one low-power / cool one for when not gaming.

From my experience with Optimus in the past: The system includes two GPUs, one that sucks for gaming and another one that also sucks for gaming :)

It's probably beter nowadays, but I will never consider it again.

But from two different manufacturers?

That's asking for trouble with driver issues.

Normally the low power gpu is the integrated Intel one that's on all their consumer chips, so it's more adding one gpu than slapping in competing ones. Although it does cause driver issues anyway, hence the thread.

Something interesting I've noticed is that there is a big difference in usability between desktops and laptops. Desktops I have far less issues. But laptops I have to get lucky to be able to use my HDMI port. And good luck doing that and having cuda support.

Out of curiosity, what laptop models + distros have you tried to set up?

On Acer Nitro 5 with Nvidia GTX-1060Ti and i5, stock Ubuntu 20.04 loaded no problems, and even DisplayLink driver for dual monitor, one through regular HDMI + other through USB -> HDMI adapter worked (though I couldn't get it to rotate display vertically).

The bugs I did have were with it constantly re-disovering network printers that I had to disable, and changing the default wifi power-saving settings because something was funky with it.

On Asus TUF A15 with Nvidia RTX-2060/AMD Renoir + AMD Ryzen 7 4800h absolutely no distro worked out-of-the-box and I needed mainline kernel + latest Nvidia drivers. But after fixing that myself Pop_OS picks up everything perfectly and no problems.

Both of them have CUDA working IIRC (at least running "nvidia-smi" says it does).

I have an inspiron with a 1060Q and had similar problems on an HP envy (forgot the card in there). I've tried a bunch of distros (I've been on linux for about a decade and mainly run Arch though).

I have heard great things about Pop and I am going to be building a new machine with these new cards and giving pop a try.

Highly recommend Pop_OS!, it may as well be called "Ubuntu, except more driver patches and performance tweaks" haha.

> except more driver patches and performance tweaks

Honestly, to me that's not a big sell lol. And probably not to the type of people that like distros like Arch. We just want nivida to work like AMD and mesa drivers do. (Having done some testing, I am able to squeeze more performance out of a distro that builds up, such as Arch, vs a distro that you take down, like Ubuntu).

This is right. I am running Pop OS, but will make the jump to Arch when I have time. I don't want to wait for the distro maintainers to release new kernels/language versions/etc. And once you start changing those things, the benefit of the distro starts to fade away.

A nice middle ground is Manjaro (there's a nice GUI to select your kernel). Though I'm not sure what nvidia settings Pop uses, because I still have the above issues with Manjaro. But this may again be laptop centric.

I've used Manjaro on two legacy laptops and a fairly recent desktop and I can only vote for it for almost anything you would want to do with your machine. It's a very lightweight and well-supported distro that has outperformed machines that are on paper twice the speed of the one it's installed on.

Not sure how easy it is to actually game on it though, haven't tried yet. For everything else however, Manjaro is an extremely solid choice, with a very recent kernel too.

I never really have Manjaro a look. My impression is/was that the focus of the distro was to be mac-like. Is that off base?

And no Snap, although I suppose that could fall under performance tweaks.

I've also ran into this. Disabling Nouveau is a must.

90% good * 90% of the time = 81% good all the time [only :( ]

The Linux drivers refuse to properly detect the supported resolutions on any of my monitors. They get the native resolution, plus 1024x768.

This is real frustrating when I want to play older games that only support 4:3 and 5:4 resolutions, because I have to knock them all the way down to 1024x768.

There's a roundabout way to manually add custom resolutions, but I've never gotten it to work with X. Maybe it would play nicer with Wayland, if Nvidia made any real effort to actually support it.

They don't "just work" with Wayland, i.e. the future of Linux desktop.

I'm here just to remind everyone that Wayland was first announced in 2007: ~13 years ago.

And Nvidia has been sabotaging it ever since.

Hell, even Canonical tried to sabotage it by starting their own NIHing alternative but thankfully Intel told them promptly to fuck off if they expect them to support it.

Jokes about the year of Linux on the desktop come to mind, but complex software that needs to track moving targets should be allowed time to mature.

Is this just for gaming/etc or does the desktop environment also cause issues if you’re just trying to use it as a highly parallel compute device?

The DEs are moving towards wayland.

That doesn’t really answer my question.... rephrased: all I do with high-powered GPU’s is Remote-SSH into hosted Linux machines and run ML jobs. Does this wayland thing have any impact there?

It should answer the question because the use case which you are stating (didn't before) is that you're using a headless environment. Which means you aren't using a DE.

IF you are using a server with a DE then it answers the question about how yes it does affect you because you are using a DE.

In either case, it isn't "just for gaming"

NVidia has always been a headache for me. I run ATI on Linux. I use xmonad as a window manager, and NVidia's proprietary drivers just didn't handle multiple screens correctly. I switched to free drivers, and they did one fewer monitor than I was driving. I switched to ATI, and then things just worked.

What's more surprising is that ATI doesn't take this opening.

At some point Nvidia crippled their drivers if you didn't have a Quadro on Linux. Eg: No multi-monitor. Not sure how of that they do now. So some guy resoldered some resistors on a GTX 690 (at the time the highest spec card they sold). To make it identify as the Quado with same specs.

https://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippl...

AMD purchased ATI in 2006, and the brand hasn't been in use since 2010..

"Just works" before ticking a "Install privative driver", and then getting many bugs. Compared to AMD drivers that just works without additional installation, have far less errors and play well with the standards.

The igpus on the 10th gen intel desktop chips I've got have been working well without any hassles, I'm running manjaro kde (and previously kde neon) on a 10400 and a 9900k igpus in wayland, and they work great!

Can you give some more info -- like which WM do you use in particular?

i think the WM i'm using is kde plasma that comes with manjaro currently, i set the compositor to use opengl 3.1 using wayland from the plasma-session-wayland package

i'm using google chrome, vscode insiders and alacritty and vlc, and that's pretty much it, with very little problems, after i boot into wayland and launch chrome i get some stuttering on the shadows which goes away after a couple of seconds, but that's pretty much the only hassle

AMD just works, as in the distro includes their drivers because they are open source.

Nvidia works if you add their repo and install the blobs, maybe. If your distro is mainstream enough.

Some distros include nvidia drivers.

My experience with a 1060 on Ubuntu is that it was fairly buggy in the early days, and has gotten better.

I don't have too many problems now, but just recently I ran into trouble with any application that used OpenGL not working, and it went away when I rebooted.

In general I'd say they've done an okay job, but still I've seen enough bugs to say they have room for improvement.

I don't know how many of those bugs are Nvidia's fault explicitly; Linux is a bit of a wild west when it comes to software configuration, and they can't test everything or fix every buggy application.

Because some DEs like KDE have devs behind them that don't want to deal with non Open Source blobs out of principle so you get a terrible experience with Nvidia. Gnome is usually fine.

Isn't it funny and ironic, since Gnome is a GNU project and was created because KDE (Qt) wasn't FOSS enough.

What package do you use for arch? Are you able to run wayland? What windowing system do you use?

I've just switched to manjaro kde and I'm having a blast using it every day for work, any tips on the nvidia drivers is appreciated. I have managed to brick my distro a few times trying to get it set up (and by brick, I mean getting it into a state that I can't figure out how to recover it from).

I've had an M4000 in my desktop and a P620 in a side-box, both running SuSE Tumbleweed for a year or so using the NVIDIA drivers. Once I got the initial setup done (follow the directions), I've had zero issues. Updates have been smooth, though there's an extra step now (hit ENTER to accept the NVIDIA license). GLMark2 score is a bit north of 7000.

They are not part of mainline linux, so if you do install newer versions, there would be broken changes that you wait for Nvidia to fix or have to fix yourself.

I have the same confusion, although I will say the only time I've EVER had a problem with nvidia drivers it was when I installed it through the package manager.

When I install them myself by running the scripts that nvidia gives you, I've never had a problem with the drivers. I've always suspected that was the problem, the way the distro's package the drivers, rather than being a problem with the drivers themselves.