Linux @lemmy.ml thingsiplay @kbin.social 1 yr. 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.)

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What other problems do you encounter? Updates are a bit annoying, but I haven't had any actual issues so far.
- @miss_brainfart 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.

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