> Life is too short for nvidia bullshit on Linux.

So much NVidia hate, but in 23 years the only problems I've had with NVidia on Linux were when they dropped support for old GPUs. Even on proprietary hardware like iMacs and MacBooks.

But to each their own.

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lpcvoid 4 days ago | parent [-]

Even when it worked, it was more clunky than AMD at all times. It came in form of a huge driver bundle you had to install manually (or rely on a distro to do it for you), while AMD GPUs just worked due to `amdgpu` being part of the kernel since forever. Then is the EGLStreams debacle where nvidia lost a lot of goodwill in my opinion, including mine. And finally, nvidia has managed to opensource their driver on Linux - except that it's less performant then the closed source one, and thus a second class citizen, still. Correct me if I am wrong, please.

The better path on Linux was always AMD, and still is, to this day, since it simply works without me needing to care about driver versions, or open vs closed source, at all.

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rabf 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

AMD used to be terrible on Linux, perhaps before your time. Nvidia was always the choice if you needed functional hardware acceleration that worked on par with windows. The nvidia driver was/still is? the same driver accross platforms with a compatibility shim for each OS. This is how Nvidia managed to have best in class 3D acceleration accross Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux for decades now. OpenGL support historically on AMD was really bad, and AMD support was through a propriety driver back the day as well. Part of the reason the AMD/ATI opensource driver gained so much traction and support was that the propritery driver was so bad! Then you get onto other support for things like CUDA for professional work which Nvidia has always been light years ahead of any other card manufacturer.

Source: Was burned many times by ATI's promises to deliver functioning software over the years. Been using Nvidia on Linux and Freebsd for as long as can recall now.

	▲	horsawlarway 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nvidia and intel on linux for near on 20 years now, and also agree - generally the ATI/AMD experience was markedly worse. Currently dual 3090s in this box and nvidia is still as simple as just installing the distro package. There was a period in the mid 2010s where trying to get better battery life on laptops by optionally using the discrete gpu vs the integrated was a real pain (bumblebee/optirun were not so solid), but generally speaking for desktop machines that need GPU support... Nvidia was the route. Don't love their company politics so much, although I think they're finally getting on board now that so many companies want to run GPU accelerated workloads on linux hosts for LLMs. But ATI sucked. They seem to have finally gotten there, but they were absolutely not the best choice for a long time. Hell - I still have a machine in my basement running a GTX970 from 2015, and it also works fine on modern linux. It currently does the gpu accel for whisper speech to text for HA.

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jlarocco 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's ridiculous to say that AMD (previously ATI) has always been the better choice, and I don't think anybody who used the ATI drivers would agree with you. For years the only reliable way to get GPU acceleration on Linux was basically NVidia.

When AMD bought ATI they started work on the open source drivers and improved the situation, but they had already lost me as a GPU customer by that point.

Maybe now in the 2020s AMD has caught up, and I'll keep them in mind next time I buy a GPU, but I've been happy with NVidia for a long time.

It would be nice if the NVidia driver were in the kernel and open source, but the Debian package has just worked for a very long time now.

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rerdavies 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

.... and this is why Linux has only a 3% share of desktop user. Having to limit oneself to 2nd-rate GPU hardware is a pretty big ask.

Viewed from the Other Side, I'm far more inclined to think that NVidia actually knows what they are doing and the authors of Wayland do not.