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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I have an nVidia RTX 3060, running on a desktop I built back in 2009. I’m running Linux Mint with the KDE Plasma desktop with no problems. All the Steam I bought on Windows, run with no problems under Linux.
Any non-Steam games, like Giants: Citizen Kabuto or Deus Ex (1) run on Wine under the default settings with no problems.
built back in 2009
The RTX 3060 didn’t come out until 2021 (the year that I bought mine). Is 2009 a typo, or are you saying that your motherboard is really that old?
I’ve had 3 different graphics cards since 2009.
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.
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.
Not with Hyprland, I had to set a nice chunk of variables to make it work properly.
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.
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…
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?
RADV has the least issues but I still tend to test AMDVLK (vulkan-headers makes switching drivers per-game easy) for any big performance differences, and it’s typically the first thing I try for crashes now. If you want to use ray tracing at all you should definitely use AMDVLK, it performs way better.
Simple answer: Yes!
Not so simple: Yes, but nvidia hates linux and their proprietary drivers can cause issues. Generally (especially on stable distros) everything is stable and fine.
It seems to vary. I had few issues with my 2080Ti but my friend had nothing but issues with his 3070. He switched to an AMD card and it worked without issue. Nvidia doesn’t put nearly as much emphasis on their Linux support as AMD does, but that doesn’t mean that Nvidia cards aren’t usable.
There’s a booby on your screen
Some ornithologists seeing this comment will be very disappointed.
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.
Of course you can. I have a GTX 1660super and it works flawlessly.
I have a Nvidia GPU, and after distro hopping a lot, it only worked right on CachyOS with KDE.
Yup
Nvidia has come a long way the past 10-15 years for Linux, just don’t tell AMD fanboys that.
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.
As a 1060 owner I’m gonna tell you this is probably the case only for newer gpus!
I had no issues on my 1050ti nor my 4070.
I did have issues on my amd phantom 2 many moons ago
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.
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.
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.
Barring very specific niches, my setup has always worked. I am on optimus 2060 + 4800H laptop
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 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.
