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ho_schilast Saturday at 7:50 AM3 repliesview on HN

This is wrong. For 14 years the recommendation on Linux is:

    * Purchase always AMD.      
    * Purchase never Nvidia.
    * Intel is also okay.
Because the AMD drivers are good and open-source. And AMD cares about bug reports. The one from Nvidia can and will create issues because they’re closed-source and avoided for years to support Wayland. Now Nvidia published source-code and refuses to merge it into Linux and Mesa facepalm

While Nvidia comes up with proprietary stuff AMD brought us Vulkan, FreeSync, supported Wayland well already with Implicit-Sync (like Intel) and used the regular Video-Acceleration APIs for long time.

Meanwhile Nvidia:

https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/extensions/NV/NV_robustn...

    It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

Their bad drivers still don’t handle simple actions like a VT-Switch or Suspend/Resume. If a developer doesn’t know about that extension the users suffer for years.

Okay. But that is probably only a short term solution? It is Nvidias short term solution since 2016!

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Ubuntu-2025-SnR


Replies

homebrewerlast Saturday at 12:45 PM

I have zero sympathy for Nvidia and haven't used their hardware for about two decades, but amdgpu is the sole reason I stick to linux-lts kernels. They introduce massive regressions into every mainline release, even if I delay kernel updates by several minor versions (to something like x.y.5), it's still often buggy and crashy.

They do care about but reports, and their drivers — when given time to stabilize — provide the best experience across all operating systems (easy updates, etc), but IME mainline kernels should be treated as alpha-to-beta material.

josephglast Saturday at 10:58 AM

I've been using a 4090 on my linux workstation for a few years now. Its mostly fine - with the occasional bad driver version randomly messing things up. I'm using linux mint. Mint uses X11, which, while silly, means suspend / resume works fine.

NVIDIA's drivers also recently completely changed how they worked. Hopefully that'll result in a lot of these long term issues getting fixed. As I understand it, the change is this: The nvidia drivers contain a huge amount of proprietary, closed source code. This code used to be shipped as a closed source binary blob which needed to run on your CPU. And that caused all sorts of problems - because its linux and you can't recompile their binary blob. Earlier this year, they moved all the secret, proprietary parts into a firmware image instead which runs on a coprocessor within the GPU itself. This then allowed them to - at last - opensource (most? all?) of their remaining linux driver code. And that means we can patch and change and recompile that part of the driver. And that should mean the wayland & kernel teams can start fixing these issues.

In theory, users shouldn't notice any changes at all. But I suspect all the nvidia driver problems people have been running into lately have been fallout from this change.

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quicksilver03last Saturday at 11:53 AM

The AMD drivers are open source, but they definitely are not good. Have a look at the Fedora discussion forums (for example https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-does-not-boot-... ) to see what happens about each month.

I have no NVIDIA hardware, but I understand that the drivers are even worse than AMD's.

Intel seems to be, at the moment, the least worse compromise between performance and stability,

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