The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[dec05eba]

Nvidia's Linux driver used to be absolute garbage for anything but CUDA (since a lot of Linux+Nvidia use at the time really was just servers that used CUDA as an accelerator). AMD's Linux driver on the other hand worked relatively smoothly, and was generally preinstalled as part of the kernel.
Nvidia's current Linux driver is fine. It's not usually preinstalled, because it's licensed differently, but it now uses the same open interfaces the AMD driver does, so it works just as well (and arguably better in some cases, since Nvidia does generally put more polish into their drivers than AMD). Since it can be a bit of a hassle running CUDA or pytorch on AMD, and Nvidia cards perform so much better in general, and DLSS is so much better than FSR, I've switched to recommending Nvidia on Linux and Windows both. Two years ago I was very strongly in favour of AMD-only on Linux, but that's changed.

I dont get it, what type of issues did people have? I used nvidia on linux from 2012 to 2023 and it was working well even back then. It was fine as long as you didn't use wayland meme (or a laptop with switchable graphics with an nvidia gpu). I have an amd gpu right now (rx 7800xt) and even my cursor lags when I move it around and my system randomly freezes with a gpu driver bug or the system crashes (all which have been reported as amd issues for years). Most of these amd issues are related to terrible gpu power management/scheduling design in amd gpus.
AV1 video encoding on amd gpus even has a hardware issue that cant be fixed in the gpu driver (it adds black bars at the bottom/side depending on the video resolution).

 

[Combustion Engine]

what type of issues did people have?

First of all and what many people will find out before they know better: nouveau. So bad the chromium devs blacklisted it years ago, but it's not like anyone using a GPU newer than Tesla will be using it anyway.. but it still lingers. The proprietary drivers? It's comparable to getting your system raped, your userspace libraries replaced with their shitty cancerous ones, ignoring everything else in your system, poisoning it to that specific version, and it's a blob of who-knows-what which may be what most people find the most upsetting, enough to attempt to blackmail the company in the past. Doesn't help they keep teasing making shit open source with the drop counter for ancient hardware few care about but some sites will still use as clickbait. nVidia wasn't considered the most hostile company to Linux for years for no reason, play the video of Linus telling them fuck you here.

But things haven't been that bad for a long time (admitted by the man himself too), and I'm sure it's painless nowadays (or even over 10 years ago, really) unless you're hellbent on no proprietary blobs and kernel modules, in which case it may just be impossible. Their drivers were absolute shit on Windows too around that time, remember the Vista launch? See pic below to get a refresher. People don't forget about this stuff or want to get burned twice. Speaking of burning, it really is best not to get into that optimus abomination..

 

[Cool kitties club]

Gnome still has a massive memory leak problem. Somehow my memory use doubled from 2 to 4 gbs overnight while my laptop was sleeping. All I have open is a pdf, a comic in yacreader, and a libreoffice document. This used 1.9 to 2 gb of memory all of yesterday but now its up to 4 gbs some how. Im going straight back to KDE or LXQT. Im so glad Fedora is making GNOME troons seethe by making KDE now a default. In my year of using fedora the KDE plasma spin has always just werked.

 

[Betonhaus]

Gnome still has a massive memory leak problem. Somehow my memory use doubled from 2 to 4 gbs overnight while my laptop was sleeping. All I have open is a pdf, a comic in yacreader, and a libreoffice document. This used 1.9 to 2 gb of memory all of yesterday but now its up to 4 gbs some how. Im going straight back to KDE or LXQT. Im so glad Fedora is making GNOME troons seethe by making KDE now a default. In my year of using fedora the KDE plasma spin has always just werked.

good. the sooner that Gnome is no longer used as a default the sooner that it fades to irrelevance and doesn't continue to ruin linux.

 

[jeff7989]

First of all and what many people will find out before they know better: nouveau. So bad the chromium devs blacklisted it years ago, but it's not like anyone using a GPU newer than Tesla will be using it anyway.. but it still lingers. The proprietary drivers? It's comparable to getting your system raped, your userspace libraries replaced with their shitty cancerous ones, ignoring everything else in your system, poisoning it to that specific version, and it's a blob of who-knows-what which may be what most people find the most upsetting, enough to attempt to blackmail the company in the past. Doesn't help they keep teasing making shit open source with the drop counter for ancient hardware few care about but some sites will still use as clickbait. nVidia wasn't considered the most hostile company to Linux for years for no reason, play the video of Linus telling them fuck you here.

But things haven't been that bad for a long time (admitted by the man himself too), and I'm sure it's painless nowadays (or even over 10 years ago, really) unless you're hellbent on no proprietary blobs and kernel modules, in which case it may just be impossible. Their drivers were absolute shit on Windows too around that time, remember the Vista launch? See pic below to get a refresher. People don't forget about this stuff or want to get burned twice. Speaking of burning, it really is best not to get into that optimus abomination..

View attachment 6988702

Nvidia coexisting with with other drivers hasn't been a problem since GLVND. I'd still suggest AMD if someone wants to use Linux as a desktop,
Nvidia only cares about CUDA and it shows.

 

[ZMOT]

Speaking of burning

 

[Marvin]

Nvidia's Linux driver used to be absolute garbage for anything but CUDA

In what way were they garbage?

I dont get it, what type of issues did people have? I used nvidia on linux from 2012 to 2023 and it was working well even back then. It was fine as long as you didn't use wayland meme (or a laptop with switchable graphics with an nvidia gpu).

Same. I think I used nvidia's proprietary drivers continuously on my main desktop from like 2006 or 2007 to today.

First of all and what many people will find out before they know better: nouveau. So bad the chromium devs blacklisted it years ago, but it's not like anyone using a GPU newer than Tesla will be using it anyway.. but it still lingers. The proprietary drivers? It's comparable to getting your system raped, your userspace libraries replaced with their shitty cancerous ones, ignoring everything else in your system, poisoning it to that specific version, and it's a blob of who-knows-what which may be what most people find the most upsetting, enough to attempt to blackmail the company in the past.

How many of those issues are actual functional users, not just freetard issues?

I never had problems with any programs linking to the proprietary GL libraries or making use of the packaged GL headers. Everything ran fine.

Everything, including occasional graphics code development, worked completely fine.

Like what are the actual phenomena that users observed?

 

[Susanna]

In what way were they garbage?

I guess they worked fine for games in wine or proton, so if that was all you were doing no issue. But I’d get kernel panics opening a spreadsheet in libreoffice, and just getting Wayland to run on it in the first place was a major pain.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Always found this Brodie character annoying, especially after he started schlocking the libreboot gock, and now he puts this shit on my timeline. "I make things vibrate" - anyone with an Arduino can do that shit. How is there 2 hours of this?

Even without the gay shit he does. Just his voice, and the way he talks is pretty annoying. The weird mannerisms. They bother me.

Arch is orientated towards people who like using Arch, god bless em. You don't need that for your first experience with Linux.

Linux Mint is a great first choice, it's extremely idiot proof.

Having gone back and used some of the Debian and other "stable" distros. I just can't do it. It doesn't have to be arch. Void, opensuse's rolling release, or maybe at least a faster moving one with a release schedule like fedora could maybe be alright. I know void was fine for me.

My problem with the super slow moving distros, that end up with packages years out of date before they get an update. Is I install the same packages I get on the normal distros I use. But they don't have the features I have been using for the last few years yet they are so behind. So I end up left with a choice. Of installing flatpak, building from source myself, or moving to the unstable repos. Most of those options suck, or defeat the purpose of using a "stable" distro.

Really in general it's like rolling the dice on whether or not Debian or other get stuck with a bad version of a package for a few years also. That and the devs hating dealing with the out of date packages to the point where they have to put disclaimers not to report the bugs because they've been fixed for years on other distros.

But, if you don't use packages that effected by it, are running a server. Have always just used Debian so you don't care that some package doesn't have a feature that you rely on, because from your perspective that package never had that feature because you haven't been using the up to date version. I could see why it wouldn't matter to you.

I do think new people should use mint though to be clear. I just can't go back to the stable release distros, every time I try, I get pissed off, and uninstall them.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

I do think new people should use mint though to be clear. I just can't go back to the stable release distros, every time I try, I get pissed off, and uninstall them.

I see where you're coming from, but I've never really had any problem with feeling that I was running out of date packages (possibly because I subscribe to the notoriously correct view that the 2002-2008 years of KDE 3 were the greatest years of the Linux Desktop).

But- that being said- I do find it very convenient to be able to run malicious Python scripts that use the latest features without having to add a separate repository for newer versions. Fortunately, if you run Devuan testing ('excalibur') or whatever the 'mainline' systemd cuck equivalent is called at the moment, you get the latest Python release that anyone out in the real world is using, and anything else that I've ever seen cited to justify using Arch. I've used this on my primary machines (ARM SBC's get the sadly systemd-cucked but dependably maintained Armbian) for a couple years and haven't ever hit any issues. By which I don't mean that I've had to boot from a live USB and manually fix things in a chroot five times like if I was using Arch. I mean I've just never had any issues at all, despite running updates every few days consistently.

 

[The Ugly One]

I've been using Rocky Linux 9 on my servers for the past 6 months and have had no problems at all. If you were on the fence about what to do after IBM fucked up CentOS, Rocky's the way to go. I didn't really have any complaints with Alma under WSL, which is what I use to connect to it.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

In what way were they garbage?

Same. I think I used nvidia's proprietary drivers continuously on my main desktop from like 2006 or 2007 to today.

How many of those issues are actual functional users, not just freetard issues?

I never had problems with any programs linking to the proprietary GL libraries or making use of the packaged GL headers. Everything ran fine.

Everything, including occasional graphics code development, worked completely fine.

Like what are the actual phenomena that users observed?

Ditto. I've been using nvidia-drivers for a similar length of time with few problems. My biggest complaint is that I'd get some minor graphical corruption on my desktop when I woke up from standby, but that was solved by F5.

 

[SphinxItOver]

Stopped watching Brodie years ago after he made a video asking viewers to follow this person because they are a "REAL FEMALE GENTOO USER"

Maybe he stopped caring about this person after he fell into the pipa fandom.

Speaking of Hector. Love how hard Brodie always shills for the thing you expect him to shill for.

So sad this poor rust troon didn't get what they wanted when they tried doing a keffals style social media call out . He had to leave the open source community because not getting what you want one time is basically heckin fascism. Linus didn't even respond to a message he sent him one time.

Even without the gay shit he does. Just his voice, and the way he talks is pretty annoying. The weird mannerisms. They bother me.

https://linuxrocks.online/@BrodieOnLinux

My brain wants to see some patterns. I tried to find the brodie vid rec-ing emilia in '21-'23. Unsure if dfe'd or burried in Odysee. Could be funny if there is a Brodie and Hector Martin connection. Sadly, I'm too behind on work to let this lunch distraction steal the rest of my day.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

By which I don't mean that I've had to boot from a live USB and manually fix things in a chroot five times like if I was using Arch

If someone's system won't boot, it's because of something they did not the distro. A lot of people run arch and arch based distros every day. Void, Gentoo, and opensuse too. And literally never have to do that.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

If someone's system won't boot, it's because of something they did not the distro. A lot of people run arch and arch based distros every day. Void, Gentoo, and opensuse too. And literally never have to do that.

The health of the drive needs to be considered, always, if bootup is sporadically impossible.

 

[emergenigger]

I used to have a nightmare of a time any time I tried to create a bootable USB, but Ventoy is an absolute miracle. Just install Ventoy, create the USB, drag the ISOs onto it, and you get a boot menu for any of them.

Serious question, why not just use dd? Does Ventoy use anything else than dd for writing bits of data to the disk?

Maybe don't use inferior software and use DWM

I love DWM, I love having to fuck around with manually installing 100+ patches just for the Suckless terminal to STILL lose the text after scrolling back up again and ocasionally crash while resizing VirtualBox.

>Just patch it yourself
Cool I don't have time for that currently

 

[DavidS877]

Serious question, why not just use dd? Does Ventoy use anything else than dd for writing bits of data to the disk?

Some ISOs can be written directly to USB. Some cannot and require a bit more magic(tm) to make them bootable. Ventoy and Rufus and others can do that magic.

Ventoy also allows multiple ISOs on a single stick instead of wiping it each time.

 

[wafflesies]

Nvidia's Linux driver used to be absolute garbage for anything but CUDA (since a lot of Linux+Nvidia use at the time really was just servers that used CUDA as an accelerator). AMD's Linux driver on the other hand worked relatively smoothly, and was generally preinstalled as part of the kernel.
Nvidia's current Linux driver is fine. It's not usually preinstalled, because it's licensed differently, but it now uses the same open interfaces the AMD driver does, so it works just as well (and arguably better in some cases, since Nvidia does generally put more polish into their drivers than AMD). Since it can be a bit of a hassle running CUDA or pytorch on AMD, and Nvidia cards perform so much better in general, and DLSS is so much better than FSR, I've switched to recommending Nvidia on Linux and Windows both. Two years ago I was very strongly in favour of AMD-only on Linux, but that's changed.

man i recently switched from a 6900xt to a 3090 and its been an absolute fucking nightmare
everything worked perfectly on amd with almost any distro, but as soon as i switched to nvidia i went from being able to use any distro to only like 2 or 3 that worked correctly out of the box.
i must have hopped like 5 times in the last few weeks desperately searching for anything that shipped a decent nvidia stack
linux mint cinnamon: if left idle for too long, screen freezes every few seconds until logout or restart. some games like guild wars 2 have severe screen tearing until i go to the settings and tick back off and on vsync. this happened with proprietary driver.
garuda: mostly works, for some reason i loaded a jpg on 4chan and my screen shit itself with green artifacts. only time i've ever seen that issue.
popos cosmic alpha: if i turn off and turn back on my monitor, my display is just gone until i hard reset. unplugging and replugging the hdmi cable from my gpu does not fix the issue.
gentoo: kde runs extremely slowly, unusable. mate has severe screen tearing even with a compositor. didn't bother trying anything else for now.
openmandriva: nobody owns nvidia hardware so if i ran an update my kernel would no longer boot, presumably due to nvidia kmods. fallback kernel doesn't boot, either. tried open driver and proprietary driver to no avail.
bazzite worked but discover has a memory leak and the devs have acknowledged it but can't fix it downstream. i could just not use discover but it happened around the same time i was crashing brave with oom so i just left it.
i haven't tried cachyos, vanilla arch or fedora kde which i heard work well with nvidia. i'm currently using popos gnome because i just need my computer to work right now and their nvidia stack is new enough.

 

[Susanna]

man i recently switched from a 6900xt to a 3090 and its been an absolute fucking nightmare
everything worked perfectly on amd with almost any distro, but as soon as i switched to nvidia i went from being able to use any distro to only like 2 or 3 that worked correctly out of the box.
i must have hopped like 5 times in the last few weeks desperately searching for anything that shipped a decent nvidia stack
linux mint cinnamon: if left idle for too long, screen freezes every few seconds until logout or restart. some games like guild wars 2 have severe screen tearing until i go to the settings and tick back off and on vsync. this happened with proprietary driver.
garuda: mostly works, for some reason i loaded a jpg on 4chan and my screen shit itself with green artifacts. only time i've ever seen that issue.
popos cosmic alpha: if i turn off and turn back on my monitor, my display is just gone until i hard reset. unplugging and replugging the hdmi cable from my gpu does not fix the issue.
gentoo: kde runs extremely slowly, unusable. mate has severe screen tearing even with a compositor. didn't bother trying anything else for now.
openmandriva: nobody owns nvidia hardware so if i ran an update my kernel would no longer boot, presumably due to nvidia kmods. fallback kernel doesn't boot, either. tried open driver and proprietary driver to no avail.
bazzite worked but discover has a memory leak and the devs have acknowledged it but can't fix it downstream. i could just not use discover but it happened around the same time i was crashing brave with oom so i just left it.
i haven't tried cachyos, vanilla arch or fedora kde which i heard work well with nvidia. i'm currently using popos gnome because i just need my computer to work right now and their nvidia stack is new enough.

Yeah, that’s about the experience I used to have. Make sure you’re using the ”open proprietary” driver rather than just the old one, I think most distros have yet to change their default because the new, working driver is technically still experimental. The setup will have a few extra steps but in my experience once you get it installed it works flawlessly in both X and Wayland.

 

[DavidS877]

My Nvidia on Linux experience has been: Install Ubuntu or Debian, check box that says "Use Proprietary Drivers."

Only glitch is when I try and play with newer kernels from Backports repos and sometimes the DKMS compile fails and if you don't notice you have to tell GRUB to use the previous kernel until stuff catches up.

Admittedly this has just been since 2013, looks like I had an ATI/AMD card before that.