Posted September 27, 2020
HeresMyAccount: B: Who doesn't use Nvidia? They make Geforce, which is like the only card anyone uses anymore. I mean, are Radeons even still available? And you're telling me that like 99% of people can't use Linux, because they have Geforce cards?!
Not sure if anyone has suggested that, but for what it's worth, I am using NVidia (Geforce GTX 670M) on one of my Linux laptops. I am not having any issues with it, so no it is not like if you have a NVidia GPU, then you can't use Linux. That would certainly be outrageous it if was so. The reason why many Linux purists seem to "hate" NVidia is because they are not providing open source drivers, but only closed-source. I wouldn't care about that otherwise except that it will mean that when at some point NVidia will not make a new driver for my aging 670M GPU and doesn't port the older drivers (which I am using now) to some future Linux version, then I can't use the official NVidia drivers in the new Linux anymore with my old NVidia GPU.
HOWEVER!!! There are also unofficial open-source, "nouveau", drivers for my GTX 670M. Apparently they are made by the Linux community (NVidia itself doesn't support them at all), and I presume I can keep using those unofficial open source drivers also with future Linux versions, even when NVidia won't provide legacy GTX670M drivers anymore for that future Linux.
I have used both the official NVidia Linux drivers and the unofficial open source drivers side by side in Linux Mint 19, and the differences mainly seem to be:
- The open source drivers are somewhat slower in gaming than the official NVidia drivers. I can still play e.g. Team Fortress 2 in Linux with the open source drivers, but yes I am getting a poorer performance then.
- Sometimes I might see some rare glitches in some games, e.g. I've sometimes seen some odd flickering shadows in Team Fortress 2 with the open source drivers, which aren't present with the official drivers.
For non-gaming use, I don't really see any difference between the official and open source NVidia drivers. In fact, the open source drivers work a bit better with the desktop use because for some reason with the official NVidia drivers my laptop screen brightness is always at 100% when I restart the system (and then I have to lower it manually to like 50-70% which is better for my eyes), while with the unofficial open source nouveau drivers the system remembers after restart to which value I had set the screen brightness before. So there is that. :)
That NVidia desktop has a Driver Manager utility with which I can switch between the official and open-source drivers. It marks the official drivers as "recommended". At some point there was some issue that I couldn't switch between them, I think the utility locked me to one drivers (I don't recall if it was the official or open-source drivers) and didn't let me switch to the other drivers anymore (they were greyed out in the utility), but googling for it I found where the issue was and fixed it. Shit happens but you just need a bit more toilet paper then.
Post edited September 27, 2020 by timppu