I still see people asking which distro to use, is it ok if they have an Nvidia card? How ready is Linux for a gamer? I have been 8 months now on Linux, it’s about this hard to have an Nvidia card: click update. The way I switched was to populate the second m.2 slot on my MB and install Linux there, I chose Nobara, that way I had the fallback of Windows 10 if I had issues. Well, I still have Windows 10, it exists as a console with no internet access, it runs my Skyrim setup with it’s 982 mods that I can’t be arsed to move. Everything else is on Linux, it’s the default and daily driver. Look close, you can see my system automatically updating OpenMW for me, quietly supporting my 260+ mod remaster of Morrowind. If you’re wondering whether Linux is ready for gaming, yea, it is. Give it a try.
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Yeah.
I recommend not letting the “wisdom of the crowd” dictate your decisions in the computing space, even with Linux.
Most of these people don’t really know what they’re talking about and are doing whatever they think will make them look good in front of their peers.
Try to see things for yourself and gain your own knowledge. Theory is no substitute for experience, but the average computer user doesn’t understand that.
I have had quite a few nvidia cards in my linux systems and all ran fine, except for a while when Wayland came along. Those issues have now been fixed as well. Your experience may vary ofcourse depending on the hard and software you use. But there is no reason to not use Nvidia on Linux.
That being said, I switched to AMD recently and had some issues with suspend and resume so it is not like AMD is the holy grail for Linux systems. I made the switch because of the opensource drivers and Nvidia being greedy fucks.
Are you using x11 or Wayland? Is anyone running Wayland with NVIDIA drivers? Everything works well in x11, but I’m getting bad flicker in Wayland. When trying to track it down I was led down a rabbit hole suggesting there is some protocol mismatch between what the NVIDIA drivers implement and what Wayland expects.
Is anyone running Wayland with NVIDIA drivers?
Yep! It’s been largely trouble free for a year or so now.
but I’m getting bad flicker in Wayland.
I had some issues the specific combination of NVIDIA card, Wayland running Plasma and VRR. But I disabled VRR, and it went away.
Since you’ve talked about OpenMW + mods, do you have any recommendations for someone who played Morrowind on Windows years ago and would like to play it again on Linux via OpenMW? What works, what requires tinkering? Any mods that you recommend?
When I tried out fedora on my gaming PC I noticed most games ran noticeably worse on my Nvidia card. They still ran, you could still play, but the experience was nonetheless worse. Elden ring went from rarely dropping below 60 on windows to hovering around 45. FFXIV which would often be at 144fps, usually around 110 during dungeons and only dropping below 100 in really busy cities, went to never even reaching 100.
It’s doable but be prepared for games to run worse. When I looked up issues I found this was normal for Nvidia cards. So just be prepared.
Yup
Nvidia has come a long way the past 10-15 years for Linux, just don’t tell AMD fanboys that.
As a 1060 owner I’m gonna tell you this is probably the case only for newer gpus!
I gamed on Linux with a 1080 for a few years there and it was alright, I have gone AMD though just so I don’t have to bother.
No it hasn’t, Nvidia usability in Linux now is the same as it was 10-15 years ago, and that’s sort of the problem. What do you think has improved since then? I remember ~18 years ago getting Nvidia to work with the proprietary drivers on my Mint was just a couple of clicks away and I could play oblivion and many other games that ran on Wine (and the very few natives we had) just fine. The majority of the Nvidia issues are self-inflicted, always have been, the problem is that because you have to use the proprietary drivers it’s very easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and inexperienced people tend to do it very often, so my guess is that 10-15 years ago is when you started using Linux, and broke stuff with the Nvidia driver, nowadays you don’t break that stuff and you think the driver has changed, when what has changed is you.
In the last 18 monts, they’re enabled explicit sync, which was pretty much the turning point in making NVIDIA drivers/GPUs usable. On top of that, they’ve open sourced the kernel modules.
It’s very very different to what it was even 2 years ago.
I download Fedora 42 KDE and clicked like 4 things to get my system working well with Steam one was the Nvidia repo, the other was the Steam repo, and update and reboot.
There’s a booby on your screen
Nvidia is FINE on Linux. There’s just a couple extra steps.
All of these Nvidia GPUs being bought for all this AI bullshit? Running Linux. Every stupid AI company runs Nvidia right now, and it’s on Linux, so don’t worry.
Pick a mainstream distro, lookup the steps for installing the drivers and blacklisting the Nouveau drivers which sometimes take first dibs, and you’re golden. Few commands at best.
AMD is just simpler because you don’t have to manage the drivers, but it’s really not a big deal. It’s very easily handled.
Nvidia for compute* has always been fine on Linux. It’s Nvidia for an actual display that’s been the biggest problem.
I had to fiddle with it for a while when I moved my main machine over to Linux a few months ago, but that’s mostly on me because I chose Arch & Hyprland.
If I had gone with a mainstream distro with a “nvidia” variant, it would have likely just worked out of the gate.
Hell, if you had gone from an arch derived distro like EndeavourOS and just clicked the nvidia option. It would have been solved.
AMD is just simpler because you don’t have to manage the drivers, but it’s really not a big deal. It’s very easily handled.
Honestly this isn’t as true as I was led to believe it was before I switched to AMD. Just like Nvidia has issues between the proprietary driver and nouveau; AMD has its own mix of issues with Vulkan between RADV (mesa), AMDVLK, and AMD’s proprietary driver on a per-game basis at times.
AMD has its own mix of issues with Vulkan between RADV (mesa), AMDVLK, and AMD’s proprietary driver on a per-game basis at times.
Good news, they’re going away. AMD is focusing entirely on Mesa now.
Then I’m pretty sure you’re a sucker who bought some hype from a post that told you to run some immutable distro.
As I keep saying: BEGINNERS NEED TO STAY AWAY FROM IMMUTABLE DISTROS
I’m not using an immutable distro and the issues with the Vulkan drivers have nothing to do with them.
Explain in detail then…
I’m not who you were replying to, and I’m by no means a beginner… but I just got the Framework Desktop with the AMD Strix Halo APU and I initially installed Fedora and could not get games to run through Steam. I eventually installed Nobara, and overall I don’t like it, but it played every game I tried without any fuss.
It ranges from significant performance differences between the drivers with specific games to games having rendering issues with specific drivers. A lot of games don’t work at all with the proprietary driver.
My most recent issue was with the Indiana Jones game having horrible traversal stuttering making some areas basically unplayable on RADV, but AMDVLK had no stuttering and better framerate overall.
That’s interesting, I don’t remember which implementation I’m actually using, possibly RADV, but don’t remember having any issues, unfortunately I don’t have Indiana Jones to try to independently confirm that the driver is indeed causing a problem there. Have you seen issues in other games?
I think the experience you were lead on to was the open source driver built into the kernel.
With that the moving parts are the kernel, and the amd-gpu-firmware. The open source setup is much more reliable, and if a bug ever arises, it tends to get fixed quickly. You update, and it’s gone.
Using the proprietary driver is difficult with regardless of vendor.
Yup, just download a gaming oriented distro and you´re fine (PoPOS [ubuntu] or Bazzite [fedora] if you like more gamey feeling)
I second that Nvidia is fine on Linux. I have an Asus gaming laptop with an Nvidia card that I use daily with no issues whatsoever, including in games (though do keep in mind some anticheat games blacklist Linux; that is not a compatibility issue, it is a conscious choice by the game makers, so not the fault of Linux). I recommend that anyone who is thinking about installing Linux checks their frequently played games on https://www.protondb.com/, and check any games they plan to buy there before purchasing them.
I’d also like to make a recommendation for a distro. If you want the easiest, practically no way to break it distro, I’d recommend Bazzite. You can select an option on download that includes the Nvidia drivers in the install so there are no extra steps to install them. It’s about as easy as it gets for gaming on Linux (it even comes with Steam preinstalled!). Find it at https://bazzite.gg/. It’s always what I recommend for Windows gamers thinking about switching to Linux (and choosing the KDE Plasma image bc it’s more Windows-like than GNOME). The other great part is that it’s immutable, so there is consistency across installs, it’s much harder to accidentally break, and you can roll back to a previous version in the bootloader if anything does break. Most things a person will want to install can be found in Flathub via the Discover app (or sometimes an AppImage), so most people wouldn’t really need to mess with rpm-ostree package overlays (tho they really aren’t difficult, but only use them as a last resort since it often makes updates a lot slower). I personally think that atomic distros are the most newcomer-friendly option out there. They just work, and they do so consistently. Unless you mess with package overlays, your exact root filesystem will be tested before an update is pushed, and bugs that do show up will typically be found quickly and fixed quickly due to the fact that the same bug will likely happen for everyone else (the exception is hardware-based or firmware-based issues, of course).
Just my 2 cents, having switched to Bazzite after over a decade on Linux, from Linux Mint, to Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Void, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Kinoite.
I used to have a Nvidia card when I started my Linux lifestyle. It wasn’t that big of a deal but a few things were broken especially with Wayland, which was hot garbage at the time. I switched to AMD for ideological reasons a couple years ago, but almost all of the problems had been resolved. I assume now only extreme edge cases would be a problem.
As far as gaming, I used to use ProtonDB before every purchase but now I just assume shit will work with a few exceptions. I don’t play games that don’t run on Linux so im missing out on CoD and a few other competitive games, but on the whole I don’t care about those games anyway. I have hundreds of games in my library and they all run beautifully on Linux with no tinkering, I can’t even remember the last time I had to fix anything.
Honestly it’s gotten boring, come to realize I actually prefer tinkering to actually playing games.
yes, they have improved their drivers quite a lot over just these last few years. you will have a couple of small nagging issues, but its mostly fine now.
when you do have big problems its still kind of annoying though ngl, but most people can run nvidia cards just fine on linux now.
when you do have big problems its still kind of annoying
Or small problems. Very annoying small problems. Like GTK 4 windows freezing when you try to close them.
I have had no issues with nVidia on openSUSE. Just add the nvidias own repo to SUSE, and it pulls their specific driver for OpenSUSE. Everything works, even turning on RTX shading in games.
No, Linus will blacklist your MAC address on your next update. Traitor.
