There's a lot of PTSD from linux users in the before-time.

Don't get me started on trying to compile 3Com network drivers.

It depends on both the hardware and distro. I got a laptop RTX 3070 and depending on the distro I got different problems.

On Linux mint, running some games in full screen will freeze the main screen

On fedora KDE/Nobara, you can have an incompatible kernel version getting installed as an update, borking the system.

On nix os KDE, blender doesn't want to render anything after waking from sleep (may be a blender issue.)

Yes. Don't brag.

In all seriousness I haven't used nvidia for ~ 6 years. Back then my issues on nvidia were periodic updates breaking, or with multi monitors. On amd ive never had a driver update break...ive also switched to a single very large 4k so that may also help.

Lot's of circlejerking online. I have no doubt that some people have issues while having an nvidia card, and I also have no doubt that in some cases the driver might be to blame.

But unless you fiddle things, go out of your way to "optimize things" by following some random posts or something like that, most common distros handles nvidia drivers properly. The same usual disclaimers applies though; being "bleeding edge" means you'll cut yourself, and all that.

For people that just install a system (and I mean something well known to work, not "the latest craze you absolutely have to replace everything with", it's fine. They (nvidia) even ironed out most of wayland issues for a while now. There are still some minor lingering issues, but nothing most average users will notice.

I've had a bastard of a time with Nvidia drivers in the past few weeks, though I'm honest enough to accept that a big chunk of that could well be a combination of user error, and that I have a fairly old 1060 GPU.

Nope. Zero issues here on three different machines.

Drivers can be weird though and small differences can be all it needs to cause massive issues.

No, they work just fine for me on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. They load and compile in updates and that's all there is.

No issues here either, I screwed up a driver update leaving Debian repos to actual Nvidia repos but other than that no issues

Nvidia drivers have worked fine for me on Mint, Parrot, and Artix. The only downside is they are pretty bloated and want to be loaded early in the boot process, so it adds several seconds to the initramfs load.

I haven't tried compiling the image without them, mostly because it's only a few seconds on boot and I don't enjoy repairing broken boot images.

2-3 years ago when I tried Fedora (I think shortly before Fedora 41 released)? Yeah, after a few hours of figuring out how to get them installed I had serious screen artifact issues still, and ultimately ended up back on Windows.

Trying Bazzite a couple months ago with the drivers preinstalled and functional out of the box? No problems since then, games just work (except Crimson Desert for a month, but I didn't actually care to play it so that was fine), and I can actually focus on learning Linux without stressing over whether I can play my games.

Yes it never worked right. Specially in all shitty laptops with a discrete nvidia card and how they all had different ways to be integrated. At least for personal laptops I only buy ones with simple integrated graphics, but was always a shitty situation with work laptops. It was particularly fun knowing that the hdmi port was only connected to the nvidia card so if I disabled the nvidia card on the bios basic shit like that wouldn't work. Let's not even mention how it was constantly crashing for sleep or when waking up.

I'm gaming on grandpa Debian using nVidia's CUDA repository for driver updates and I'm sitting fat and happy. Ignore instructions to install kernel headers for your specific kernel and just use the linux-headers-amd64 meta-package and it will automatically install new headers when the kernel updates. DKMS will rebuild the nvidia module for the new kernel and now kernel and nvidia driver updates are seamless. Performance is not noticeably different from when I was on Windows.

The only improvement at this point would be kernel-level integration like AMD has so I don't need to add a repository, but aside from that I honestly don't see room for improvement.

Since I started using arch I've been fine. Ubuntu was rough though. Since Ubuntu and derivatives are mostly considered beginner friendly I can see how it might be a bigger issue. Maybe it is also a problem with older cards that don't get as many updates.

I switched to Linux because the nvidia drivers on windows got so bad my GPU was crashing once every boot. On Linux I regularly have significantly worse performance (especially in VR) but its more stable. I'm fine with a lower fps rather than just getting kicked out of games when the driver crashes.

Would be nice if they worked on those performance issues, though.

It's been fairly good for me on bazzite with my Nvidia card. I have to set some launch options in Steam from time to time to make HDR work but otherwise I'm happy (I had Nvidia issues on a different machine using Ubuntu but switched to different drivers and things improved)

nah i used mint for years with nvidia, it got good at least a couple years ago. i still have a thinkpad with nvidia running ultramarine, and i haven't thought about the drivers even once after installing.

on the dumber side of the fence, sister was complaining about nvidia drivers being shitty on winslop, now she switched to amd and the drivers are way shittier.

funny how it turned this way.

I had a problem on my work laptop with them about five years ago, but rolling back fixed it. Never on my personal machines.

Edit: TBF, I’ve never had a personal laptop with an nVidia card. I generally prefer to build my own desktops, though I do have a laptop. It has an AMD GPU, also with no problems.

But performance according to benchmarks is much worse than on windows.

In AMD case it is higher on Linux if you exclude RT

I'll do you one better: do not buy ANYTHING made by Asus. That stuff's built to fail as fast as possible.

I don't think that is a function of the nvidia GPU save that ANY discrete GPU will cause increased wear on battery and heat. Also something that starts out with 6 hours battery and now has 2 is a lot less useful than something which had 10 and now has 6.

I have one of those, and my solution was to permanently disable the Nvidia card in favor of integrated graphics. Yeah...

ProArt here with AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU. Zero issues on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Just upgraded yesterday.

I had a 3060 and it wasn't that Linux wasn't reliable but it occasionally would receive an update that would require a video card driver update as well. I bought a 9070xt, sold the 3060, and haven't had a single issue since.

Still has an issue with HDMI speed since HDMI is a proprietary spec and they don't allow 2.1 in open source drivers so it's stuck on 2.0 speed. Displayport is very good though.

Same. Hopefully AMD still bothers making GPU with...is it 1% market share while Intel gave up entirely again? Dire.

This is why I'm annoyed that AMD hasn't released a high-end graphics card for 4 years. I don't want to build a brand new gaming PC with a 4 year old GPU.

Had nvidia spectacularly fail on Fedora

The people who are yapping about this kind of stuff literally haven't even looked around or explored any of the options. Nvid drivers running flawlessly for years.

I'm on nobara and it's generally fine, until I try to plug in my TV via hdmi to game or watch tv from the bed. Idk if it's just that TV, or if it's having 3 displays, or even just mixing DP and HDMI, but it flips its shit when I do that. I plan to troubleshoot at some point when I'm not in such a cramped space.

How did you get sleep to work?

I'm also on Fedora with a 5060 and that's my only issue after getting it setup and fixing the initial black screen on boot. Runs games and my own CUDA code well.

I'm in the same boat. As soon as I can get comparable performance at a price I can afford, I'm jumping ship from team green.

Serial terminal gang represent!

Regular desktop stuff and gaming usually works fine. Problems start cropping up when you try to use some more advanced GPU-powered apps, or do development yourself. I've encountered even older OpenGL apps that fail to start unless you force them to use the Mesa software renderer.

Same with Arch, they were slower to adopt Wayland but stability has been fine for the last decade.