I have used both AMD and Nvidia cards on Linux for a long time and with Nvidia it's mostly fine now days, but their driver situation tends to be fine until the rare time that it isn't. I switched back to AMD last year due to the occasional driver issue that left me dead in the water. And by occasional I mean like once every year or so, not something common. It is entirely possible that you'll never have much of an issue, but I started to take note of my Nvidia driver versions and and especially noted when GPU drivers were updated so that I had some notion of where to try to roll back to if I ran into issues. I haven't had any issues like that with my AMD cards for a long, long time in Linux (with Windows obvious the situation was more of the reverse of this).
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For gaming on Linux, use latest release (e.g. v575) of Nvidia driver. And for everything else stick to production release (e.g. v570).
Just use the newest driver and you'll be completely fine. Even with very recent hardware, everything works as expected for me.
People like to shit on Nvidia, which is deserved for their business practices and relationship with Linux in the past, however most who claim that there are issues clearly haven't used an Nvidia GPU under Linux in a long time.
It just works.
You can expect your computer to function properly.
As long as you're using modern drivers, such as 570 or later (preferably 575), your experience should generally be fine.
Nvidia rightfully earned their bad reputation on linux, but over the last year or two they've put a ton of work into improving it, specifically in wayland support.
One of the last major open issues is DX12 performance. DX12 performance is kinda all over the place depending on your hardware, game, and game settings, but you can generally expect around a 20% performance hit to DX12 games compared to windows. DX11, opengl, and vulkan games perform about as well as windows. Dx12 performance on Nvidia has been a known issue for years and Nvidia was silent on it, but just a few months ago they finally publically acknowledged it and claimed they were working on it. In my experience, Nvidia typically pretends problems don't exist until they actually decide to fix them, so we can probably start expecting improvements to DX12 performance soon.
I've been exclusively gaming with Nvidia on linux (CachyOS) for about a year now and my experience has been satisfactory, so you should be fine.
Nvidia rightfully earned their bad reputation on linux,
Really? IMO not with GPUs. They have released linux drivers for decades, and always in time for new kernel versions. ATI was typically way behind and buggy as hell. I would likely not have switched to Linux on the desktop in 2006 if it wasn't for my GPU "just working", without any fiddling. Performance was always equal to Windows and stuff like multimonitoring just worked. They even had their nice setup utility to configure Xorg for you.
Could they have handled the transition to Wayland better? Maybe. But claiming they earned a bad reputation in regards to GPU when they are the one big vendor that had extremely active linux support for ages is dishonest and unwarranted, IMO.
Dishonest and unwarranted? What?
They dragged their feet on wayland and tried to force EGLStreams for years, causing a ton of work for open source devs. Their drivers on linux are still significantly more annoying to install than AMD or Intel and still use proprietary userspace drivers. This all and more is the definition of earning their bad reputation.
You know what's dishonest and unwarranted? You trying to twist my words and imply I compared them to other manufacturers when I didn't. More than one company can rightfully earn a bad reputation, and ATI definitely did as well. Nvidia was indeed better for a long while, and then earned their bad reputation over the later 2010s and early 2020s.
It should work. The only practical issues are:
- Usually, you will have to manually install the proprietary drivers (I think Fedora makes this relatively easy)
- Wayland (the protocol most desktop environmentss use nowadays) support may be hit-and-miss at times (it will mostly work but it's not as polished as with Intel/AMD), and Proton (the thing that lets you play Windows games) may not play well either.
The ideological issue (which you probably don't care about) is that it pretty much requires proprietary (non-FOSS) drivers which run in kernel space and so in theory have complete access to all data on your computer (but then so does Intel ME). This is the main reason I personally will never use NVidia cards.
Yes, on fedora you just click the check box for the Nvidia driver repo in KDE Discover or Gnome Software, and you're good.
The ideological issue (which you probably don’t care about) is that it pretty much requires proprietary (non-FOSS) drivers which run in kernel space and so in theory have complete access to all data on your computer (but then so does Intel ME). This is the main reason I personally will never use NVidia cards.
The only meltdown I've had with Linux occurred on a minor rev-level update to Debian that plugged some hole in the kernel the NVidia proprietary driver was crawling through. I had used Debian and an NVidia proprietary driver for years on an ancient motherboard. Then suddenly that "solution" disappeared. I had to replace the whole machine. Yeah, it was time. No, I wasn't ready. I don't know whether I should have been more pissed at Debian or NVidia, but I'm still on Debian. After the kernel update, X11 reverted to a default driver, and no install, uninstall, reinstall combination of the proprietary drivers seemed efficacious. I'm sorry I don't remember the exact software rev-levels and drivers involved. All notes I took at the time, if any, were lost in the subsequent crash and recovery from incompetently trying to roll back the kernel update.
That one sounds squarely on Nvidia. Any driver that uses undocumented workarounds to gain kernel level access or utilizes an access loophool for system hooks is a bad driver. I'd assume Debian, or likely more accurately the Linux kernel itself was updated following some matter of CVE that Nvidia was quietly abusing.
Frustrating, but a good example of why those kinds of proprietary drivers are such a nightmare. You really just don't know what techniques they're using.
The Nvidia issue is overblown IMO. Yes, it used to be petty bad a couple of years ago with bugs and glitches all over the place, especially with Wayland. These days not so much. Just use the proprietary Nvidia drivers and you will have a solid experience. It's honestly been over a year since I last had an issue that I could narrow down to Nvidia hardware.
Just make sure to read some reports from people with the same model of laptop. Laptops with very specific hardware can have compatibility issues.
I don't know about that man. Installed Fedora 42 and GNOME to run with my RTX3080 and GNOME froze and crashed at random constantly. Installed KDE Plasma instead and it runs just fine.
I get what you're saying but I don't think it's overblown having put up with issues myself with a mainstream 3070 card. A year really isn't very long and it's been a series of issues for me. When I've seen reports that the issues are fixed I have tried Wayland sessions and still find basic problems like video lag on my dual 4k set up without any clear solution. I have an Nvidia GPU and I avoid Wayland as a result.
My feeling is that they've fixed the issues perhaps for most useage cases but not all, and it can be enough for just 1 unfixed issue to ruin your experience.
I have a 3070 and am Linux only now; I'm currently looking at an upgrade for my GPU and genuinely I'm not even looking at an Nvidia GPU such have the annoyances been with Nvidia and wayland support. Many people who want specific features of Nvidia cards may not be so lucky
Even if Wayland support is fixed, I'm in the category of once bite twice shy with Nvidia on linux.
I definitely had issues with my 3070. I ran it in Linux for 4 years before recently switching back to AMD. It was usually only minor issues like it not playing well with certain DEs, but sometimes certain driver versions would make my system unusable/unbootable until I could roll them back. I am glad some people never had it happen, but pretending like it wasn't a thing just makes you ignorant.
I had some weird issues with my 3080 Ti on Fedora 41 and 42 and have recently switched to a 9070 XT.
Most games ran fine, but other programs acted strange while games were open. Space Engineers, Escape from Tarkov, and a couple other titles wouldn't allow me to use other programs. The cursor would stay the same as in-game, even when alt-tabbed, and the Discord UI would become unresponsive.
I had several strange issues with my monitor flickering that didn't resolve until I uninstalled and reinstalled my drivers.
I had a horrible issue with Minecraft and other OpenGL games that caused a strobing white screen while playing. I forgot how I resolved that one.
I had to reinstall drivers several times. I don't know how much of it was self-inflicted or just how it goes on Linux.
None of these issues have come up while on my 9070 XT.
Yeah I have a 3070 and have experienced similar sorts of minor annoyances when using Wayland. When I see reports that issues are fixed I try a Wayland session and still find various oddities or issues.
They may be marginal useages but for me I have a dual screen set up and I might game on one and have a video open on another, or even have two video streams open, one on each screen. I find videos slow down and lag, or have artefacts. Issues I don't get on X11 or when I was in windows.
I'm in the same position of looking to upgrade my graphics card and I'm looking at AMD to avoid any more Nvidia related issues. I love using Linux but I don't want to be dealing with Nvidia drivers after past experience.
Good specific experience to know, thanks. Basically the only game I do care about is Minecraft, so as long as I do get that working, I'll be fine.
I use Prismlauncher, it's great for managing multiple versions with different mod lists, Java versions, etc. Nice, clean interface, and you get a background cat!
The only problem i see its not in their repos, and you have to add the non foss repo manually and its third party.
I've been using Aurora which is an immutable distro based on Fedora. It's from the same guys who do Bazzite. I use it on my work laptop with a discrete Nvidia card. I've had zero issues with the video driver. (I use Bazzite on two desktop and a laptop at home, all with Nvidia cards).
I really like these universal blue distro because on the odd occasion that I have an issue after an update, I can reboot into a pinned working version of the system. There are only a couple of CLI commands to learn to pin and unpin the different systems. All currently available systems appear on the grub menu. It's kind of brilliant IMO.
Only downside is that installing RPM packages isn't recommended, but I've found pretty much everything I need through flathub. I have one RPM package installed for VeraCrypt (no flatpak and it doesn't work right in a container) but it hasn't caused any issues for me.
Edit: I should say I can't speak to the ongoing driver issues on the 50 series cards. The newest card I own is an RTX 3080 LHR 12 GB.
Yeah, can't recommend Aurora enough. It's awesome to have literally 0 driver issues, since the system image already contains the drivers pre-installed.
I have a 3070 and generally I have no issues with gaming or working in X11.
I have previously had major issues with Nvidia and Wayland and I don't use Wayland as a result on that machine . Many of those issues may have been resolved now but at present there isn't a need to be using Wayland although it is being increasingly pushed. Problems I had were laggyness in the desktop, and videos becoming choppy if I had more than one major process running on the GPU (eg game and video in browser, or two browser windows both with video). I believe such issues have been fixed in the past 12-18m but I'm now in the habit of using X11 on the machine with no incentive to try Wayland again for now.
It is very easy to avoid Wayland - as simple as ensuring X11 is installed and then logging out of a Wayland desktop session and logging into an X11 session once and keeping with that as the default.
I do have a separate AMD machine with integrated GPU and that has been running Wayland from the get go. On that machine I've never even had to think about this issue and have just let my fedora based distro (Nobara) default to Wayland. It's been very much an Nvidia issue.
I have been using Endevour os with Wayland KDE for quite a while now with few issues. I bet you would be fine.
for me? stuttering and freezes on wayland, its kind of hit and miss sometimes. more like missing my amd gpu.
None? Lol. However i have a 1080 and Wayland has memory leaks. I think related somehow cuz the amd boxes are fine and newer nvidia too.
If you’re gaming DX12 has really ass issues. It’s a bit annoying to setup for wayland too, but otherwise works fine!
Might want to try Nobara which is basically fedora but it installs proprietary gpu drivers on first boot
Pretty sure Fedora can do that too, you just have to select the option in the installer
Pretty much no issues at this point. In fact, in some ways I feel NVIDIA has done better than AMD recently.