Maybe my experience is vastly different, but Nvidia just works. I have a laptop with 3080, a Threadripper with 2x3090 and an Intel with a 4090 and A6000 and it works without any fuss in Linux (I mostly use it for Deep Learning but sometimes gaming as well).

> but Nvidia just works

Not really. On some/several/many Nvidia cards (I had a few), one can't even boot with a stock Ubuntu CD, because Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD.

AMD's drivers are at least open source and integrated in the kernel. On the other hand though, having owned several Nvidia and AMD cards, I didn't find any brand to be noticeably more stable than the other (each one had issues).

> Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD.

In my opinion an open-source driver not written by Nvidia and an Ubuntu ISO not packaged by Nvidia aren't indicators of Nvidia "just work"ing or not. There are many distros where Nvidia drivers come installed out of the box.

* * *

fglrx was pretty nightmareish itself 15+ years ago

nvidia driver on the contrary has always been reliable

Twitter and Reddit were pretty reliable, too. Needlessly putting yourself at the mercy of a company, especially perhaps for your main computer, seems like a recipe for waking up to headache where rage posting on social media is your only recourse.

99% of people's only recourse is rage posting on social media even if the drivers are open source. Not everyone is technical enough to work on graphics drivers or want to sponsor someone else to work on it.

The point is to keep the development incentives aligned with your incentives, and for it to occur within the wider ecosystem, such that cross-purposes problems don't happen in the first place.

> In my opinion, formed from over two decades of Linux, a piece of hardware having a libre driver written for it is the exact indicator of what can be relied upon to "just work".

Then this opinion can be discarded as not grounded in reality. In order to run pytorch at high speed I need to do... basically nothing. It just works.

Many things can be said about ROCm support for 7900XT, none of them are positive. "It just works" drivers from AMD come several months too late.

According to multiple sources, Ubuntu has more than 30% of the market share; independently how it is, it definitely has a lot of weight in the Linux world, and its practices/standards.

That sounds like a bug with Ubuntu not having the proper drivers.

I just did a fresh Arch install last week. Running 6.4.1 kernel on a ThreadRipper CPU with an RTX 2070 Super and an RTX 3060. Driver version 535.54.03 and CUDA 12.2. Everything "just works". There was no manual configuration, tweaking or hacking around needed. No issues running Wayland, Proton is handling gaming beautifully and not a sign of screen tearing.

The experience is different for everyone it seems.

Same here with a much less beefy system; I did have screen tearing (on Xorg) which was fixed by following the instructions at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting

I can play almost all single player games, whether they officially support proton or not; the only major game I have been unable to play (despite following all instructions online) is Gris.

This is about CPU, not GPU. Also dealing with AMD GPU drivers is just as difficult.

> Also dealing with AMD GPU drivers is just as difficult.

This was true ten years ago, and remains true only for hardware dating back to that time period. My old HD7850 is a royal pain to get running properly on a modern distro.

For any remotely recent GPU that's supported by what's built into the linux kernel, it's pretty much seamless. There are no specific driver updates to deal with, which model of card does not matter, etc. It's all just built into the kernel.

This has been my experience with my Radeon RX 6750 XT and Manjaro. I didn't have to do anything and it just works. I use Steam/Proton to game and that just works as well.

The 7850 was from the transition period where the radeon development was ending but it also didn't get immediate amdgpu support.

An earlier card will use radeon and be easy to setup, a later one will use amdgpu and be easy to set up. That generation takes a bit of work.

HD7850 is a SI family card so should be supported by radeonsi, no? Where is the difficulty in getting it running? Do you mean Vulkan support for DXVK?

AMD GPU drivers come with Linux distributions by default. There's literally nothing you have to do, unless your GPU is very recent.

My gpu is quite recent and the only thing I had to do was make sure I'm running a recent kernel.

I also had to make sure I'm running a decent enough MESA and a recent enough llvm and a recent enough linux-firmware. It's not trivial.

But if you're on a distro with a recent enough version of those things, it Just Works.

I do wish distros like Ubuntu were more on the ball with regards to hardware support though. Ideally, someone running an up to date Ubuntu LTS should have a system which just works with new AMD hardware within at most a few weeks. It's currently a matter of many many months.

Just as difficult? AMD GPUs are plug-and-play on linux (if you have latest gen you should run a recent enough kernel but that's basically it), whereas Nvidia GPUs need their proprietary drivers which adds much more complexity for beginner users.

I'm not even sure why people have this myth that AMD's GPU support is good on linux. Having an upstreamed driver doesn't mean much when it's just as buggy and unstable as the closed drivers were 10-15 years ago. Everyone I know using a modern AMD GPU on Linux evangelize the fuck out of them while simultaneously complaining about constant black screens/hard freezes/poor performance in games/etc. I've never experienced such issues with nvidia and besides the annoyance of having to make sure you have the proprietary blob installed there's no real issues.

I genuinely don’t recognise what you’re describing - for context I have a AMD APU system (5750GE - zen 3 and vega GPU cores), and a steam deck. I’ve had the APU for over a year now. I also have a desktop with a NVIDIA 3090.

All three are stable for general desktop use on Arch Linux (so up to date kernels etc). The NVIDIA set up has massive compute advantages (CUDA), but for desktop use if anything I have fewer issues on AMD - especially relating around desktop tearing and video which is where I have the most pain with NVIDIA.

Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).

My experience is that universally my linux gamer friends who own AMD products have worse experiences than I do - they are absolutely usable, but not worth buying at all if your primary purpose for owning a GPU is gaming.

> Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).

Most likely you are playing games that Valve has already deployed patches/hacks for. Go off the beaten path from Steam and the proton runtime and you will find quickly that AMD is severely buggy.

Black screening is especially common with vega dgpus, can't say if it extends to the igpus are not but if you google 'vega black screen bug linux' you will find hundreds of reddit posts and bug reports about this going back to 2018.

I’m playing quite a wide variety of titles - from recent AAA on the Steam Deck to really old titles that have never even been on Steam. Plus emulators for all sorts of systems - from really old up to things like GameCube/Wii or even Switch.

I can’t speak to discrete cards, but it’s been pretty reliable for me.

I’m curious as to if your friends are using distros with older Mesa/kernels? That might explain some of the disparity.

That bug was fixed over a year and a half ago.

Because it's not a myth for everyone?

I think issues exist on both sides, you're just picking examples that work for your argument

> Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users

Actually, Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years. You remember fglrx and that stuff? Well, Nvidia worked.

yep. nvidia was the only choice back then. I don't see how folks have forgoten that. But, now it's all AMD for me, because amd doesn't require a closed source driver or userspace. Apparently that will change in the next year or so though. It'll be interesting to see how the open nvidia stuff compares in the future.

Nvidia will always require a closed source userspace, the only part they've opened is the kernel side. And the new kernel driver only works for 2000 series or newer.

But it's still a pretty huge step in the right direction, even though it won't be as nice as AMD's fully open source and upstreamed driver.

Some people have no idea how nice it is now compared to 15 or 20 years ago.

I took an NVME out of an Intel machine, threw it into an AMD machine, booted it, and everything just worked, graphics included. No weird network drivers to track down, sound card drivers, proprietary graphics or even xf86- stuff needed.

This was me. I had a Radeon 290x. It worked alright, but fglrx was terrible (and the config UI was the only non-English app in my system, it didn't respect locale settings), and when AMDGPU first arrived, it was a horribly buggy flickering mess. I upgraded to a 1080Ti after high-end Vega failed to materialise, and nvidia's drivers kind of just worked, especially on Ubuntu (they were proprietary of course, but so was fglrx).

It wasn't really before Wayland started being a serious option that nvidia started to become a problem. I've now upgraded to a Radeon 7000 series GPU, and the open source drivers are a breeze and Wayland works much better than it does under nvidia's drivers. But I maintain that at least during the GTX 900 series through probably the 2000 series, nvidia was the only reasonable choice, even on Linux, especially if you wanted anything mid-range or above.

> Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years.

That was very welcome at the time, but the bar has been raised. I now have the option of a GPU that plays games and integrates well with all my other OS features, so I switched. It has been great to be free from all the annoyances that came with the Nvidia drivers.

Never used fglrx. Open source Radeon driver worked well (including OpenGL suppor in Mesa) on old ATI Radeon R200/R300 cards 20 years ago.

Notice that they are talking in the present tense, while you are talking in the past tense.

Yeah what I found with these recent generation combo of nvidia + intel while powerful and while I can install linux, had issues with serious over heating causing a shut down where the nvidia driver was causing heat issues on the laptop, once switching back to windows 11, no more thermal issues.

CPU, not GPU...

Do you game on a laptop? The only thing you do with Nvidia on desktop is $install-cmd nvidia

This is about CPU, son AMD vs Intel, not GPU for which AMD is competing against Nvidia

the positive/negative parasocial relationships people have with AMD and NVIDIA (respectively) borders on "splitting" in the personality-disorder sense. AMD represents everything wholesome and good about computing and nvidia represents everything bad and malicious about computing, to a lot of people. And when they see one of the brands they just have to hammer that post button to signal their virtue.

You're reading way too far into someone getting the context wrong.

Nah, these off topic rants are pretty much there in every single topic here. Every AMD/nVidia article has bunch of people just ranting without even trying to read the topic.

When the topic is explicitly a popularity contest, talking about which one is better is pretty reasonable.

No, ranting how nVidia kicked your dog because your favorite screensaver doesn't work in a topic about CUDA computation on Linux is not reasonable.

> in a topic about CUDA computation

That doesn't sound like a topic about a popularity contest. So why did you say "No"? Your statement doesn't disagree with mine.

Even here on HN, even when it isn’t a mistake, basically any thread that mentions nvidia essentially devolves into “Linus said fuck nvidia”. It’s effectively a thought-terminating cliche and it poisons almost every GPU discussion.

It’s really not just the Linus thing either. Every time AMD does anything anti-consumer people feel the need to temper it with praise about all the good they’ve done, and give them every benefit of the doubt about “maybe this isn’t true, maybe they had a good reason, etc” while every single thing nvidia does is viewed through the most negative and malicious possible lens.

It’s pretty clearly some variety of splitting plus parasocial attachment, AMD is “the good one” and nvidia is the bad one.

Anyway, it just sucks because it poisons discourse. How many posts did we get into this thread before the “Linus said fuck nvidia” canard came out? Zero, they opened right up with the thought-terminating cliche. It gets old after the 10,000th time.

This, the toxic fanboyism around this is uttery exausting to read.

(I also love how you're being downvoted for wishing for a better debate without fanboy rants.)

>AMD represents everything wholesome and good about computing

Must be an opinion of someone who has never had to deal with AMD customer support.

NVidia are the only GPU manufacturer that actually support Linux.

What? AMD develop their open source drivers and submit them to the kernel and they have their own set of Linux specific closed source drivers.

To be fair, pre-amdgpu, nvidia's proprietary linux drivers were sadly an exceptional "supported" situation.

Back then it was basically just Intel's integrated graphics that had first-class mainline support. The AMD linux support is a relatively recent shift historically speaking.

Intel really should get a lot more recognition for its mainline Linux graphics support though. Without their contributions over past decades we might not even have a modern graphics stack at all in-kernel.

Yes, and the open-source ones are not accelerated, and the closed-source ones don't work.

Please don't spread misinformation. AMD GPUs have had full 3d acceleration out of the box for several years now. I use Linux exclusively and had great performance in 3D games on R9 380, RX 570, and RX 580, all using the mainline (obviously FOSS) driver.

Yep, and the docs are freely available.

https://gpuopen.com/amd-isa-documentation/ for AMD.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/graphics-for-li... for Intel

No, it's got useless crippled acceleration that's only suitable for games. You can't use them for video.

Vulkan Video is literally supported in ffmpeg.

Okay, let me know how you get on editing video in ffmpeg.

ffmpeg is one very small but important part of a complex chain.

Wow, software 3D rendering must have really gotten fast then. I play all my Steam games on Linux using the open source amdgpu driver. Or maybe I just imagined all those extra frames in RDR2. Someone should tell Valve that the Steam Deck could be a lot faster.

Or, I guess the other option is that you’re spreading misinformation.

Great. Now try editing video.

Not our fault your distro has outdated ffmpeg and mesa. Vulkan Video is nice.

Nothing uses Vulkan Video.

They still suck though. I fully believe they're trying their best - AMD apparently can't write production-quality graphics drivers on Windows either - but I don't think they're reliable enough to be called "supported hardware", at least not yet.

No they're not

Both AMD and Intel have actively-maintained open source drivers in the Linux kernel.

Both of which are useless for video.

I installed the official drivers on Fedora 38 and Debian 12 lately and had zero problems with it. DKMS just rebuilds them after each kernel upgrade.

Chrome and other stuff still don't work great but is that NVIDIA's fault? Honest question, I don't know.

I’ve stuck to nvidia for years and it’s reliable on Linux. Needs proprietary drivers for full performance. I don’t think they’re actively hostile since they have drivers available. It used to be that you struggled to get acceleration. Nvidia drivers were the only reliable way. I had an ATI GPU too and drivers were not as good on Linux.

Article is about CPU, though, and both manufacturers seem comparable. I have Ryzen for price/performance.

It’s CPU?

I've had nothing but issues with AMD on Linux. 7970,280x,rx580 and vega64. All of them had horrible bugs for what I was doing and amd opengl sucks. I eventually got sick of all the hard lock bugs running emulators, and the driver devs not wanting to fix it because Nintendo was their customer.

Then I switched to nvidia and everything just works with similar performance to windows.

Unless installing the drivers is too hard, nvidia is the best was to game on Linux

Installing the drivers is easy, but that doesn’t mean they work immediately. I got a fairly old computer a couple of years ago and put an RTX 3070 in it… I tried installing several distros and each of them would go through the install fine, then give a blank screen when I tried to boot. I tried all sorts of configuration and driver installations, both free and offical NVidia. I finally got one to work like it should, but it took about 10 days of messing with it.

Spoilers: he was trying to install them all on Ubuntu 16.04

This is CPUs, not GPUs.

>> Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users.

Nvidia has excellent Linux drivers.

Both these statements can be true. Their drivers can be excellent but try to do anything with your Linux machine after the Nvidia drivers are installed and you run into trouble.

Ubuntu release upgrades used to be impossible w/ Nvidia drivers. You'd get into a situation where you'd boot into a text-only console, but because nvidia didn't do kms you'd get 40x25 with the first few characters off the screen.

Now I buy AMD.

New kernel means driver reinstall, always. Apt now runs the dkms reinstall for you.

I agree, but the article is about Intel vs AMD, not AMD vs nVidia marketshare among Linux gamers.

>The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers.

And the worst part of gaming on AMD is dealing with AMD's drivers, no matter the platform.

Steam Deck users don't seem to be complaining at all about their experience.

> Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users.

Citations and facts needed. Also, please enlighten us why NVIDIA owes Linux or its users anything. Please. Just take it slow.

> The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers.

NVIDIA [Linux] drivers have been the staple of quality and features for the past two decades sans rare f ups, such as 3090 Ti's dying (took them a week to fix) and frequents BSODs on Windows Vista (due to a completely new driver model which took them quite some time to polish).

I'm pretty sure I've dealt with NVIDIA a lot more than you've ever done but I cannot relate to this statement at all despite being an NVIDIA Linux user for over two decades. I wouldn't claim that you're lying through your teeth, but I'm pretty sure that this post has a ton of emotions and very little essence.

I'm not surprised to see hatred towards the company but in absolute most cases it doesn't mean anything.

If you've been a 20-year Nvidia Linux user like I have, you'll have countless horror stories of system upgrades and kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop.

How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed?

How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again?

How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason?

If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago.

> If you've been a 20-year Nvidia Linux user like I have, you'll have countless horror stories of system upgrades and kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop.

I've had zero "system breaks", neither has anyone who used a distro supplied driver package. And if you installed from the official SH file, well, you did it at your own risk and you had to understand what you were doing. In short, you're lying.

> kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop.

Again, didn't affect those who used a distro supplied package. Those who used the installer patched the kernel, which I've done countless times but over the past four years I've done it zero times. In short you're lying again.

> How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed?

Never ever happened to me or anyone who I know. Show me actual fixed bug reports where NVIDIA is blamed for breaking the DM or bust. I think you're now lying again. Xorg support in NVIDIA drivers have been stellar aside from older GPUs and older drivers not supporting newer Xorg releases but then HW companies do not owe you infinite support. People who expect their more than 15 year old GPUs to work with modern OS'es and support all the features are lunatics.

> How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again?

What?? Did you come up with this BS in your dream? I've been using NVIDIA since late 90s. Never ever in my entire life I've got the Xorg config file lost. In fact, and here's you lying again (!) Xorg reads this file and closes it right away. It doesn't keep it open. Under no conditions this file could have been lost now or ever. And Xorg has used auto configuration for almost a decade now if I'm not mistaken, so there's no xorg.conf file to speak of. I have a small file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d to enable CoolBits in the NVIDIA driver, that's it.

> How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason?

You are making stuff up. Again, there will be no bug reports, citations, anything.

> If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago.

I've been using NVIDIA since Riva TNT2, thank you very much. And the list is a lot longer than you could imagine including MX440, FX 5600 (it was horrible), GeForce 6100 (integrated GPU), 7600 GT, 8800 GT, GTX 660, GTX 1060 and now GTX 1660 Ti.

I don't remember your nickname on nvnews.net (do you even know about this website? nah, I don't think so) - NVIDIA's Linux support forums in the late 90s/early 00s which tells to me everything.

Almost everything you wrote (sans occasional kernel incompatibilities which did _not_ affected normal people) is just pure made up crap.

I can show you nvnews.net and forums.developer.nvidia.com threads with actual issues but you've listed none.

I'm the person who filed this https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/511 and it affects countless people, mainly Turing users.

I know how none other than kernel hackers _intentionally_ broke NVIDIA drivers recently by breaking EFI console, a malicious patch which was later reversed because it affected more than just NVIDIA drivers.

And I also frequent kernel bugzilla and AMD/Intel bug trackers. They have far more serious bug reports.

AMD drivers for certain GPUs have been broken for a large number of people in the past three "stable" releases, including 6.3.9, 10 and 11: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-9b7e0890...

AMD open source drivers have become semi-decent maybe in the past two years at most. Oh, except, RocM. Intel fares better but they are not strangers to deal breaker regressions.

No one is perfect, and trying to say that NVIDIA is hostile to Linux while offering a high quality driver is either malevolent or just mean but it's definitely not true at all.

I know this crap dearly, sorry.