I am going to buy a new graphics card and can’t choose between Nvidia and AMD. I know that Nvidia has bad reputation in Linux community but how really it works? And I heard recently their drivers got better. What can you recommend?

P. S. I don’t want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)

  • brisk
    1·
    3 hours ago

    I put a 3060Ti in my latest build. The NVidia drivers would consistently hard lock my PC after about a day of uptime no matter what I did. I spent ages trying to hunt down the issue, and waited through several kernel and driver versions in vain hope, fuelled by people insisting that the NVidia drivers were “good now”. I switched to nvidia-open once that released (or once I realised it existed) to no avail. Nouveau was not available at all for those cards when I started and was still missing critical features at the end.

    I think this is the first time I’ve ever encountered a kernel crash in nearly two decades of Linux computing. And second, and third and…

    I switched to an AMD card, a 7600 (a generation newer! In case anyone thought this was a “new hardware” issue) and the problem was immediately gone, and my PC has returned to being my sanctuary.

    My problem is exceptionally rare - I think i found one other person experiencing it over the course of 1-2 years. But the concept that NVidia had redeemed themselves continues to ring hollow for me.