this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024

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Is Linux pretty much unusable with an Nvidia GPU? (beehaw.org)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been trying Linux Mint on my old dell laptop with an nvidia GPU and it's been just one impossible issue after the other.

Even games that have native linux versions like Valheim don't run if I'm running off the GPU (but run if i switch to the integrated intel gpu but with terrible performance). Some games that work with proton work fine but have tons of weird issues like not being able to type specific characters on the keyboard, or the game and the entire OS just randomly freezing after 15-20 minutes - it happened in both warframe and guild wars 2 for example. Every time it happened I had to do a hard reboot since it was completely unresponsive.

I tried installing bottles and couldn't get through the basic setup of the GOG launcher without getting black screens in it. There were some workarounds with no-sandbox launch arguments at one point but I think I eventually gave up on it. Steam had tons of issues with launchers freezing, or steam itself getting stuck on constant shader updates every day I start the game.

I tried changing proton versions, installing wine and lutris manually, changing nvidia drivers (randomly trying other one since there's no useful info online about which to pick or which ones even work...) and it never got to a satisfactory point. I still have no idea which drivers im supposed to be using (if it's not the recommended ones that come with Mint), or how to properly update them manually.

I've had steam somethines just not run at all, I run it and nothing happens. I see it in the process manager, kill it ,restart it... it gets the temporary update popup and then disappears with no error message whatsoever.

I actually own a steam deck and I never had any major issues with it, so my only conclusion is that this time it's the fault of either linux mint (which is supposed to be the stable, no-nonsense OS), or the different hardware - probably the GPU.

So yeah... is the conclusion wrong, or is it really simply pointless to try linux with nvidia?

edit: hardware info:
GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile
CPU: i7-7700HQ
I'm currently running Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon
Nvidia drivers in use are the latest ones available from the driver manager (currently nvidia-driver-550).

Will try PopOS! next

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Works fine for me. I'm on Manjaro with a GTX970 and it works just fine.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

It might be Mint or an issue with your laptop. I've been using Arch for a while and haven't had major performance issues. Before I used Arch, I used Pop!OS and didn't have any issues either. What are your laptop specs? Have you already looked into Nvidia Optimus? Have you tried other distros?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

From my own experience on my older Lenovo Legion with the optimus GPUs (intel integrated, nvidia 3060m dedicated) it was always a bit of pain.
Though I think I settled on using optimus-manager and with just the right tweaks it worked, when I wanted to game I restarted my whole desktop session to run on the nvidia gpu.

Are you using bumblebee/primus with optirun/primusrun ? back before these were the main pain points. (I am also assuming you are on X11 Desktop Environment - afaik wayland on older nvidia gpus is basically impossible. Also, are you sure you are using the proprietary nvidia driver and not nouveau? Nouveau is unusable for gaming.)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Anecdotal, of course, but I've been gaming with almost zero big issues on POP! _OS with the baked in nVidia drivers since half a year ago. Both via Steam and via Lutris w/ Wine/ProtonGE. Some bugs here and there, but nothing that makes it impossible to get a satisfactory experience.

Of course it's a different distro which you might not like, but if you really can't make your games work on Mint do consider changing to POP! at least for the time being

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

+1 for pop, used it for 2 years with very few issues on an nvidia gpu

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I wouldn't say unusable but NVIDIA definitely makes things way more painful than they ought to be with their closed source drivers and general stubbornness to support newer technologies under Linux, see Wayland. Mint's generally older packages also might be working against you.

In my experience, I've had the smoothest experiences with gaming focused/adjacent distros which just include the NVIDIA drivers out of the box, such as Nobara or Bazzite. Those just work for the most part with no user intervention, and you don't even have to think about it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Have you not watched the famous Linus Torvalds video on this? If you haven't, here's a nice upscaled version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPh-5P4XH6o

But yeah, there's a good reason why most of us here avoid nVidia.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=xPh-5P4XH6o

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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