Hi all,

I’m in the market for a new big desktop replacement gaming laptop, and looking at the market there are almost exclusively Nvidia powered.

I was wondering about the state of their new open-source driver. Can I run a plain vanilla kernel with only open source / upstream packages and drivers and expect to get a good experience? How is battery life, performance? Does DRI Prime and Vulkan based GPU selection “just work”?

The only alternative new for my market is a device with an Intel Arc A730M, which I currently think is going to be the one I end up buying.

Edit 19/11: Thanks for all the feedback everyone! Since the reactions were quite mixed - “it works perfectly for me” vs “it’s a unmaintainable mess that breaks all the time”, I’m going to err on the side of caution and look elsewhere. I found a used laptop with an AMD Radeon RX 6700M, which I’m going to check out the coming days. If not, I’ve also found Alienware sells their m16 laptop with an RX 7600M XT, which might be a good buy for me (I currently still rock an Alienware 17R1 from 2013 with an MXM card from a decomissioned industrial computer in it).

  • @Yerbouti@lemmy.ml
    7•8 months ago

    Linux noob here. Why do people refuse to use the proprietary driver? I did not had any seriousl issue with my 2080ti on Nobara. I can game and edit videos with better performances than in windows with same pc

    • @wimOP
      10•8 months ago

      I have had so many issues with Nvidia drivers, especially on laptops with Optimus. Black screens after booting, random breakage when updating, having to fuck around with OpenGL libraries all the time when you have integrated Intel graphics and Nvidia graphics on the same system. It’s just a pain for me on laptops.

      Wouldn’t be such a big issue on a desktop, but I’ve had a work-provided workstation with an Nvidia and 99% of the time if something broke on that machine, it was because Nvidia wasn’t compatible with some updated kernel or libraries.

      Intel and AMD have both provided us with a painless driver experience that just works out of the box all the time and is integrated in all the open source things (mainly the Linux kernel and the Mesa libraries for OpenGL & Vulkan). With Nvidia, you need to throw all that out and use their proprietary blobs for OpenGL and Vulkan.

      Also, I just think Nvidia is a scumbag company, trying to force single-vendor proprietary solutions on the market by abusing their dominant position (pushing CUDA while refusing to implement any new OpenCL version for over a decade, so software vendors couldn’t just pick a competitive open alternative is one example, the original G-Sync is another). I prefer not to give them any money if I can help it.

      • @interceder270@lemmy.world
        0•8 months ago

        I’ve had all those issues back in like 2014.

        Nvidia Optimus has come a long way on Linux. Manjaro and Mint have utilities to enable it out of the box.

        THAT SAID

        We still have to prepend all programs we want to use the Nvidia GPU with prime-run. I’m not sure if mobile AMD users have to do the same, but this is legitimately annoying as hell this many years later and would actually be a good reason to pick AMD over Nvidia.

        • @Sentau@feddit.de
          3•7 months ago

          I’m not sure if mobile AMD users have to do the same

          No we don’t. Mesa and the kernel automatically decide to use the dGPU for intensive tasks. It is only on rare ocassions that I have to use the DRI_PRIME=1 to force the use of the dGPU. It has been months since I last did it

          • @interceder270@lemmy.world
            1•8 months ago

            Thanks. I’ve been curious about that.

            Gonna start sharing it as another reason why I would choose AMD over Nvidia, in addition to the drivers being open source.

    • lemmyvoreEnglish
      6•8 months ago

      I’ve been using Linux for over 20 years and I don’t get it either. I don’t know why a vocal minority get so fixated on it. It’s not like it’s the only manufacturer with proprietary drivers. As long as the drivers work and are easy to install I don’t see a problem.

      I’ve used ATI/AMD cards equally over the years and I’ve always ended up having more problems overall with them than with Nvidia cards & drivers. If I were inclined to generalize I could say that open source drivers are apparently lower quality, right? 🙂

      But that would be just as silly as the other way around. I don’t think that open or closed drivers, in itself, automatically says anything about quality.

      If closed source drivers really were a problem then Nvidia wouldn’t be used by 80% of Linux gamers.

        • lemmyvoreEnglish
          1•8 months ago

          That’s because starting with April 2022 they mixed the AMD chipset from the Deck in with the PC stats. If you go back to March 2022 it’s different.

          • @donio@lemmy.world
            1•8 months ago

            Yep, I realized that as soon as I posted and tried to ninja-delete but too late :)

            If I sum up the numbers from March 2022 it’s 26% AMD and 38% NVIDIA.

    • @Pantherina@feddit.de
      3•8 months ago

      Its a proprietary driver, which could be an insane security and privacy risk. Its a modification to your kernel, normal on Windows, but not on Linux. It basically makes Linuxes security model weak.

    • @yum13241@lemm.ee
      3•8 months ago

      Often times it doesn’t install or they insist on using free software (read: free as in free speech)

    • @PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3•8 months ago

      A few reasons:

      • There is a strong desire to see if there is secret sauce in the driver that makes their cards so darn performant. Could it be applied to other video drivers?
      • To audit for vulnerabilities and fix them.
      • To allow the driver to use some kernel internals that the kernel developers keep trying to wall proprietary drivers off from.
      • Ideology
      • Community might be able to hack it to work better with Wayland, since the Wayland team has no interest in extending any kind of support to proprietary driver driving GPU’s… despite x11 working just fine forever. … see Ideology.
    • @Swiggles@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      2•8 months ago

      Try playing games like Cyberpunk. I dare you :)

      You are lucky if you can play without a crash for even one minute with that card. I am not exaggerating. Something is seriously messed up with the 20XX series.

      Also Wayland is still a mess for Nvidia cards overall which is becoming more and more important.

      • @Yerbouti@lemmy.ml
        5•8 months ago

        Weird. I’ve tried about 12 games, they all work perfectly. Only in one case, I had to switch to an x session. Wayland is super responsive, only some small visual glitch from time to time. Da vinci studio edits and render videos super fast.

        • @Swiggles@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          1•8 months ago

          According to a ProtonDB user the specific crashes I am referring to have been finally fixed with 545.29.02. So two weeks ago for a 5 years old card. Good job Nvidia!

          I would have loved having that earlier, because I threw mine out after all the frustration with Nvidia and I still doubt that it is fully working now.

          Don’t get me wrong it’s great for others stuck with Nvidia hardware though. I would never ever recommend buying any Nvidia hardware for Linux though. The experience is miserable compared to AMD.

          • @Yerbouti@lemmy.ml
            1•8 months ago

            Guess I got lucky then. So far so good for me, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed, just in case.

    • @EddyBot@feddit.de
      1•8 months ago

      using external kerner driver (“out of tree”) come with caveats you need to take care of
      typically most linux distros will do this completely transparent but certain usecases will be more complicated
      espcially if you install packages outside of your linux distro repository like a newer kernel version or an older Virtual Box version