1y ago

Rant about Nvidia related updates on Linux

There are many reasons to dislike Nvidia on Linux. Here is a little thing that bugs me all the time, the updates. Normally the system updates would be quick and fast, but with the proprietary drivers of Nvidia involved, it gets quiet slow process. And I am not even talking about any other problem I encounter, just about the updates.

As an Archlinux based system user (EndeavourOS to be precise), I get new Kernel updates all the time. That means every time a new Kernel version is installed, the Nvidia driver DKMS has to be installed too. And that is basically the slowest part. But that's not too bad, even though it's doing this twice for each Kernel I have once.

What's more infuriating is, if you also happen to use Flatpaks for a very few applications. I really don't have many Flatpaks at all. Yet, the Nvidia drivers are installed in 7 versions or what?! And they are full downloads, each 340 MB or more. This takes ages and is the only part that takes long to update Flatpak system. I always do flatpak remove --unused to make sure nothing useless is present. /RANT (EDIT: Just typos corrected.)

105 comments

And in addition to that, it's the only thing that breaks on my system that isn't my fault.
My next GPU will definitely be AMD unless Intel catches up very quickly.
- My embedded AMD GPU has been unusable under Ubuntu. Constant crashes/freezes. When trying to find a workaround (unsuccessfully), I found lots of other people with slight variations of the same problem - same symptoms, but different root causes... seems like at any time there are several system-breaking bugs and every time one is removed another is introduced. You just have to hope your kernel happens to be one that happens to work with your specific config.
  My next platform will be Intel-based.
  
  Which embeded gpu?
  
  I don't get why people bringing up AMD issues always get down voted. The bias is real. I too am getting constant freezes with my Radeon 680M that have gone unresolved for almost a year.
  Quite a few people are experiencing this so it isn't an isolated issue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/2220
  
  AMD works fine for me. I had a Thinkpad P14s for a while and my gaming computer uses a 6800 XT.
  
  Of you have a thousand year old laptop with an amd embedded you can have such problems. Don't draw the wrong conclusions about current Amd.
  
  Can you use AMD CPU and Intel dGPU?
  
  There's been a long standing amdgpu bug over the past year, there is a Kernel flag that fixes it mostly. Haven't had issues since the latest mesa and adding this flag. (RDNA3)
  
  Just ubuntu or AMD APUs in general?
- Hyped for the RX 7700/7800 XT, cuz they either replace my previous goal of a 4k capable card or bring down prices for the 6900/6950 XT a bit.
- I would have thought Intel would be decent on Linux. It falls behind on Windows because it doesn't have all the years of broken game fixes baked into the drivers like AMD and nVidia have, but isn't all the Linux gaming done through Vulkan wrappers around DirectX?
  
  Intel has the best software support - AMD just has more powerful hardware and good enough software support
  nvidia has the best hardware on paper, but no software support
  A large number of games support Linux natively thanks to Valve’s pushes, and use OpenGL
  DXVK (directx to vulkan) is one of the more popular translation layers for other games
  Intel also uses DXVK on Windows to help with older versions of DirectX (primarily DX9 afaik) on their ARC cards
- I run Pop_OS with a temperamental Nvidia GPU that is unstable at factory clock speeds, but solid when I reduce the power limit by 5-10%. The only recurring annoyance I have with pop is that the flatpak GreenWithEnvy breaks after every GPU driver update and requires a manual flatpak upgrade to fix.
  Similarly for my work laptop also running pop on nvidia, the big frustration is again nvidia related. Battery life is poor since hybrid graphics doesn't work and external displays only work with the discrete graphics card.

That means every time a new Kernel version is installed, the Nvidia driver DKMS has to be installed too. And that is basically the slowest part.
ZFS users: "First time?"
- @qwesx I am not familiar with ZFS filesystem. How does it affect this or plays a role?
  
  ZFS also requires a lengthy DKMS build step to compile a kernel module.

Uses NVIDIA
Imaaaagine!
Seriously though, I feel for you. NVIDIA is shit and while you're dealing with this, I hope you know which vendor you'll not be giving money to in the future. Fuck NVIDIA.
- @elouboub It's AMD. 100% sure. And the best part is, the situation with Nvidia is nowadays improved. So this is the current best case we have...
- I just switched from my 1060 3g to an rx580, because 3 gigs of vram is nothing on Linux. But good god, it's so much better to use AMD on Linux. Nvidia has fixed a tremendous amount of crap over the past 3 months, pretty much all the major issues with Wayland, Prime displays etc are not history. Many of these were fixed literally just weeks ago, but as long as their driver has to be installed separately with a kernel module hook, it will never compare.
- NVIDIA is shit
  I would call that an exaggeration. It's not perfect sure, but it has finally improved a lot in the last year and it works for some. I had to get a new gaming laptop earlier this year and the only good option I could afford had an NV card. It was a great deal from Bestbuy certified open box, $500 off (I love those open box deals with 30day return).
  It works well, I play Guildwars2 and BG3 flawlessly through XWayland+proton with great performance. Maybe it works well because I put it into Dedicated Nvidia mode, instead of using Optimus? (I never liked Optimus)
  Sure it's not perfect, I get graphics glitches in KDE if bringing the laptop out of sleep, funny colors and a mouse with a funny trail, but I don't need to use sleep, I boot it in the morning and shut it down in the evening, it's no biggie for my use-case.

The flatpak thing is a known issue, where it doesn't correctly remove the 32bit package on update.

This bash script should find the latest and remove the rest:

    
#!/bin/bash
# Filename: flatpak-clean-nvidia.sh

# List latest 64bit Nvidia flatpak (it doesn't leave cruft behind) and note the version
FLATPAK_LATEST_NVIDIA=$(flatpak list | grep "GL.nvidia" | cut -f2 | cut -d '.' -f5)

# List all installed 32bit Nvidia flatpaks, ignore latest version, uninstall rest of list
flatpak list | grep org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia- | cut -f2 | grep -v "$FLATPAK_LATEST_NVIDIA" | xargs -o flatpak uninstall
`

I have an alias I call "upd" that runs "yay ; flatpak update", I just run that, press Y at the first prompts and then let it run in the background while I do other work. It really doesn't matter at all how long it takes. I do have NVidia but generally I don't feel it takes very long as we don't get new kernels every day. You could use the linux-lts kernel for much more rare kernel updates.
It's a bit like bittorrents, I don't need them to download in 30sec, I start it and return to check on it whenever I think of it.
I have changed my opinion on flatpak btw, I really like that the apps are not spread all over my system but instead sandboxed neatly, have fewer dependency versioning issues and it's really easy to use.
- @ProtonBadger The entire update process takes 20 minutes or so (never timed it), at least sometimes. I also had an alias before, but recently rewrote it as a script to do similar things, including pacman, yay, flatpak, rustup and a few other things. And from all of this stuff, most of the time its flatpak that inflates the update process time.
  
  That's abnormal, it shouldn't be like that. My flatpak rarely has updates (compared to Arch/yay) and they're quite fast, still less than a minute even if there's updates to the NV libs (I didn't time it). There must be some kind of particular issue? What's your setup?
  Looking at it - I got flatseal, chrome, firefox, thunderbird, dropbox, steam, joplin, cryptomator, mesa, NV libs, gimp, discord, resynthesizer, libreoffice and some other bits on flatpak. It's on an SSD, Internet 150Mbps. Is it installation or download that's slow for you? With it being 20min I would guess there's a problem with the download speed from the server, routing issue to flathub, etc? Flatpak is not that much of a slog.

What other problems do you encounter? Updates are a bit annoying, but I haven't had any actual issues so far.
- @missbrainfart There are many little things encountered over the years. But I do not have a list or anything like that. Nvidia is always in my way somehow. Wayland support was or still is not great with Nvidia in example and one of the reasons why I don't consider trying Wayland.
  Then for a long time it G-Sync didn't work properly with applications that should, had some tearing too related to problems with picom. I have to run the nvidia-settings gui once at boot, otherwise I have all the problems described before. I use a command to run it without showing gui. Found this solution by accident after 6 months of terror, as searching the web didn't help me.
  And for a long time, I got used to it and it wasn't driving me crazy or anything. When I put my system to sleep and wake it up, the Firefox window would have garbage pixelation (complete random). I just had to move the window once and everything was normal again. That's because it has GPU acceleration and somehow this is a known bug by Nvidia that is unsolved. Or at least it was, because this does not happen anymore.
  What do we have else in my head right now? Gamescope, the SteamOS compositor, didn't work with Nvidia before it got official support. I needed that to solve a problem, to play a certain game that was otherwise not playable. So yes, that's not a problem anymore I think (didn't use it for a while now), but it was another thing that was in my way. I know this has todo with the official support of Gamescope and not just being nvidia, but it was related to Nvidia and in my way.
  Somehow... the problems I encounter are connected to Nvidia. But as said, I don't have a full list of problems and these are just a few things come to my mind.
  
  Yeah okay, I don't even use a DE that supports Wayland, and I don't have a need for it anyway, since both my monitors run at the same fixed refresh rate.
  Now that you say it, windows being all garbled and pixelated after waking up from sleep is definitely something I encounter quite often.
  Annoying, but nothing that breaks everything, so that's good I guess.
  Other than that though, my experience is flawless.
  I'm still going to move to AMD though.
- The latest drivers on mint, 535, cause flickering on my monitors. There are a bunch of posts about this; when I installed them when they came out my screens went black and never recovered, had to power off manually, and then the top part of my monitors would just flicker every 15-30 seconds. I rolled back to 525, and now that it had been a couple months I had just tried to upgrade again recently but the problem remains, black screen, reboot, flickering.
  
  I used Mint briefly on my desktop PC, and the Nvidia driver was the one thing that gave me issues. The recommended one was too old for some of the things I wanted to do, but the most recent one at the time made everything unstable.
  Now I use EndeavourOS, and Arch seems to handle that driver a lot better.
  
  The screen flickering issue is also sadly not limited to Mint. I was on Fedora over the last few months, and am now on Arch and still get that issue.
  Also doesn't seem to be restricted to the DE either, just the driver itself being shitty it appears.
- Haven't had many issues either. My Nvidia 3090 has given me way less trouble than both my Vega 64 and Radeon 680M.

My exact solution to this on Endeavour was to just stop using flatpaks lol.
Literally everything I used from flathub was also either on the AUR or trivial to install manually from the host GitHub.

I was wondering what the fuss was about until I read flatpak. I don't use those, no reason to on Arch since everything is in the AUR. But it was interesting to read.
- @1984 Unfortunately not everything is in the AUR or I do not want to trust everyone on the AUR. And there are other reasons to use Flatpak over native packaging (including AUR):
  kdenlive and Krita: I do not want to install the entire suite and dependencies of KDE.
  bottles: The Flatpak version is the recommended one by the devs and the only supported one I think.
  xemu: Yes it's also available on, but I do not know who the uploader and manager of this binary is. While the Flatpak version an official package is.
  zeal: Same reason as xemu.
  And that's basically it (ok there is Flatseal too... but that does not count to our discussion). Everything else is installed through native packaging. So there is not much reason to use Flatpak and I just started with it recently. But there are sometimes reasons for.
- Every major Linux dist has community repository, arch isn't special. Arch users are like people doing CrossFit, dude No one cares if you use arch.
  
  Oh that's where you are wrong.... Arch is actually really special. No other distro comes close to being so easy to install the latest version of software. I've run almost all major Debian based linuxes also and they are mostly frustrating in comparison.
  You just can't find the software you need, or you have to download it manually, meaning it's not even updated by your package manager. People resort to flatpak and the likes just to be able to have the software they need since it's not packaged in any other way.
  Arch is just better and I highly recommend it.
  
  AUR is not the same as the community repository on other distros though. Community repositories on other distros contains pre-built packages supplied by community members, while AUR contains build scripts that let you download the source code directly from the vendor website, compile it into a package and install it in your system with a single command, so you'll often get the bleeding edge version faster than most community repositories on other distros.

You have a bunch of duplicated stuff because flatpak is a piece of shit. With traditional packaging apps supporting your platform would get exactly one choice. Support the fucking version of nvidia that everyone else gets to or fuck off. In all likelihood all your shit would work work with the most recent release but because they have the option to be lazy fucks and make you download Nvidia 7 times this is your life now. Also if dkms takes appreciable time you either need to stop running Linux on a toaster or delete some of the 17 kernels you are hoarding for some reason. You need like 2 the one that you know works and the new one you just installed.
- As an app developer, we provide the source, binaries, and a Flatpak, but we sure as hell aren't going to help you debug the Nvidia drivers on some random distro if you don't pick Flatpak.
  
  Why would you need to? Apps might likely need functional drivers for your hardware to exist but most things aren't going to directly relate to or depend on a particular version of the nvidia driver. If it does you might be a bad developer.
- @michaelrose Thank you for your help. Much appreciated.
- Wow
- Gardotd, is that you?
  
  I do not know who that is.

I've kind of gotten used to the first issue already. I don't know if I can switch to the non-DKMS drivers now that I'm using the LTS kernel though.

If you use the Zen kernel there is no reason to keep the regular one around.
- I always did, saved my ass a couple of times when Zen broke.
- @Sina I have LTS and the newest one.

Which terminal font is that, by the way?

@aleph "Cascadia Code"
Here is fastfetch output:

 undefined

    
OS: EndeavourOS x86_64
Kernel: 6.1.51-1-lts
Uptime: 50 mins
Packages: 1149 (pacman), 34 (flatpak)
Shell: bash 5.1.16
Display (AG271QG): 2560x1440 @ 120Hz
DE: qtile
WM: Qtile 0.22.1 (X11)
Theme: Arc-Dark [GTK2/3]
Icons: Qogir-dark [GTK2/3]
Font: Cascadia Code (12pt) [GTK2/3]
Cursor: Qogir
Terminal: xfce4-terminal 1.1.0
Terminal Font: Cascadia Code (13pt)
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) E3-1230 v3 (8) @ 3,7 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
Memory: 3,11 GiB / 15,57 GiB (20%)
Disk (/): 122,70 GiB / 227,21 GiB (54%) - ext4
Disk (/media/Backup): 149,83 GiB / 916,70 GiB (16%) - ext4
Disk (/media/Emulation): 3,83 TiB / 5,41 TiB (71%) - ext4
Disk (/media/My): 1,04 TiB / 3,58 TiB (29%) - ext4
Disk (/media/System): 411,39 GiB / 915,82 GiB (45%) - ext4
Locale: en_US.UTF-8

Nice, that's a new one on me. That lower case k is pretty unusual.

Looks like Cascadia Code to me

If you have several kernels you might want to disable the fallback kernels. You do so in the .preset files in /etc/mkinitcpio.d/
But yeah this is the downside of using flatpaks. That's why I think it's better to avoid flatpaks and other similar sandbox environments. I know the Linux community are desperate for the increased stability and supposed benefits to security but you're paying the price in worse performance and high disk usage.

Eyyy, i just updated all that too!

I switched from a 3070 to an Rx 7900XT on Sunday. Uninstalling all of nvidia shit was great. I used linux-zen so that meant using nvidia-dkms. So happy I don't have to deal with that anymore. And yeah, I use a lot of flatpaks, so removing all of those nvidia drivers was also a great feeling. And now I can use Wayland!
- @skulbuny I do not use zen and get the dkms. But honestly, the twice-dkms installation (one for each Kernel) isn't too bad. The real issue for me is with Flatpak. I'm currently in the process of choosing and building new PC. Wish I could afford 7900XT, but together with an entire PC building it gets too expensive for me. Looking forward to AMD!

~~For what concerns flatpak, did you try flatpak remove --unused?~~
Edit: I didn't read you already did it, nvm
- @gabriele97 Yes, I stated that in my post and it can be seen on the screenshot.
  Edit: No problem. :-)

Thank you for not blaming maintainers who have no controlover nvidia idiocy.
Also why not mesa?
- @uis I didn't blame anyone particularly. I am just upset about the current situation as a Nvidia user. And it's a warning to anyone who thinks about getting a Nvidia card on Linux.
  Not sure why Mesa. It does not have the proprietary driver in it, does it?
  
  It does not, that's why I am suggesting it.

Im not a PhD on Arch, but, why are you using Flatpak to install a driver that is available at AUR??? When it comes to drivers, try to stick to your distro ones, unless you really know what you are doing!
- @hellvolution I do not install the driver in Flatpak, it does it automatically. Each application can depend on specific driver versions I guess and that is how it ends up installing multiple versions. That makes it quite robust to be honest, because if a new driver version sucks the application can just request to use an older version in example.
  Before accusing people not knowing what they are doing, maybe you should learn about the technology you talk about. There are reasons why to use Flatpak over native Arch packages. One reason is in example I have installed kdenlive, but do not want the entire KDE suite, services and applications installed and running on my system as well.
  
  Yeah, so you're telling me you don't want the entire idea suite installed (which can be reduced by installing only the plasma version), but you are ok having 500 different Nvidia drivers, which are at least 350MB each... grats! Continue to use flatpak!!! 😂🤣😂🤣😂😂
- That’s how Flatpak works…
  Flatpak applications will use the graphics library installed from Flatpak
  If you have an nVidia card, you’ll need the nVidia Flatpaks to run applications
  If you have Intel/AMD, you’ll get a Mesa Flatpak

You can manually remove all of the previous drivers and their GL32 counterparts, your flatpaks will still run as long as you have the newest drivers.
I'm not sure why they don't get caught by the --unused flag, but they are definitely not needed from the flatpaks I've tested with.

That's what you get when you build unstable kernel APIs. Meanwhile in sane land: https://docs.kernel.org/gpu/drm-uapi.html

I don't get these kind of problems with windows
- @Destraight Windows does not have Flatpak.
  
  Ok

105 comments