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Things currently stopping “YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP”
- Anti cheat
- Adobe
- Microsoft Office Suite
- Nvidia
- No availability of Linux PCs in physical stores
These but to a lesser degree
- AutoCAD
- Obscure research/academic/industrial software
- Music production software
Music production software RIP. Not to mention the Lovecraftian horrors of the Linux audio stack. It’s gotten so much better with REAPER and there are many great VSTs but there’s still a long way to go.
It’s so frustrating that I can’t run office software. But why is adobe a problem?
Adobe has a huge presence in the creative industry. Lots of professionals (read majority) can’t use a FOSS graphics suite because Adobe is an industry standard. And Adobe cannot run on anything except Windows because (I forgot the exact article) certain portions of Adobe are highly entangled with Windows, and porting it to Linux makes no financial sense.
Before others talk about the alternatives, Adobe still has huge inertia. It will be years before they are dethroned, assuming they continue to fuckup.
Good summary.
I’ve been working a while and think the latter things combined with the unfamiliarity of MDM/IT management tools in Linux has stopped much wider adoption.
So many industries just MUST run a few key apps that were designed and battle tested in windows long ago, as in wet lab science, manufacturing, and medicine to name a few I’ve seen.
Also stability (sorry but it’s hard to beat a MacBook).
I feel like most industries didn’t run Mac books as standard.
am still using my GTX 1650 till it breaks
Am I the only one who has no problems with Nvidia drivers?
It depends on both the hardware and distro. I got a laptop RTX 3070 and depending on the distro I got different problems.
On Linux mint, running some games in full screen will freeze the main screen
On fedora KDE/Nobara, you can have an incompatible kernel version getting installed as an update, borking the system.
On nix os KDE, blender doesn’t want to render anything after waking from sleep (may be a blender issue.)
@RustyNova @MyNameIsRichard
>On nix os, blender doesn’t want to render anything after waking from sleep (may be a blender issue.)seems to be cuda issue. On my machine cuda sometimes refusing to work after sleep, requiring some ‘node restart’
Might be fixed by disabling modeset (nvidia-drm modeset=0), or by blocking display server from using nvidia drm node (if display output does not use nvidia)Meh. I actually like it because it reminds me to save the file.
Although nice domain name lol
Yeah on fedora or any other rolling distros you’ve got to look it up online if an Nvidia driver has been released before upgrading the kernel. I always forget to do that and I’m forced to touch grass for a few days until the driver gets released.
Personally that was a deal breaker for me. After a long day at work, coming back to chill out and do some blender only to find out your setup is booked and now you have to fix the system, it really gets on you.
Thankfully I had an old Linux mint partition I never cleaned up (Too lazy), so I could have continue, but the average user would just go “fuck Linux. Going back to windows”.
Yes I switched to bazzite on by gaming PC for that reason. Works really well and I can always play my games without that fear, or the annoyance of windows. I always recommend bazzite to new users for this reason.
Fedora works really well on my laptop tho
I’m not a big gamer (and factorio doesn’t have the full screen issue) so I still use mint, but I’m gradually switching to nixos. Works better… If you add the correct config for game scope and the rest (easily found on the wiki)
I’m still at least a year away from falling down the nixos rabbit hole, but I can hear it calling to me. Good luck tho
As a nix os user, I would recommend it if you are actually willing to learn the config language. It will be hard. And 2 months into actually making nix os my main machine, I still have no intuition with how to edit the config more than “copy paste this file, add the new code, import”.
Is it worth it? Ehh… I just like how I can actually know what’s installed and not forget a 30 GB app I never use is still there
Yeah I’ve experienced the nobara issue a few times
Yes. Don’t brag.
In all seriousness I haven’t used nvidia for ~ 6 years. Back then my issues on nvidia were periodic updates breaking, or with multi monitors. On amd ive never had a driver update break…ive also switched to a single very large 4k so that may also help.
Lot’s of circlejerking online. I have no doubt that some people have issues while having an nvidia card, and I also have no doubt that in some cases the driver might be to blame.
But unless you fiddle things, go out of your way to “optimize things” by following some random posts or something like that, most common distros handles nvidia drivers properly. The same usual disclaimers applies though; being “bleeding edge” means you’ll cut yourself, and all that.
For people that just install a system (and I mean something well known to work, not “the latest craze you absolutely have to replace everything with”, it’s fine. They (nvidia) even ironed out most of wayland issues for a while now. There are still some minor lingering issues, but nothing most average users will notice.
Minor lingering issues like DP displays not consistently waking up after sleep without a hard power cycle, VRR and HDR being essentially unsupported, and basic driver functions like frame rate limits not working?
Your average users might notice some of that…
Running Debian 13 with a 3060ti with Nvidia drivers, 3 monitors mixed DP and HDMI, and as far as I can tell those all work just fine. Save for the VRR, I haven’t tested that at all.
Mixing DP and HDMI works, using DP only causes issues with resume from suspend.
This is my main problem with these “Nvidia is fine on Linux posts”. People have something work in their specific setup, and assume it works in all setups, and that just isn’t true.
I’m not assuming it works in all setups. If people only talk about things that don’t work though, it doesn’t help move people to Linux. I’ve got a feeling that like with much of anything, the problems seemingly are overblown because those who aren’t having problems don’t have a reason to say so.
As someone who tried moving to Linux on my main pc multiple times, fuck that. There’s nothing overblown here. Theres always some problem.
I wouldn’t say my setup is that unusual: two monitors and a nvidia GPU from the 2010s. But I am stuck on Ubuntu 24.04 because it still has xorg – my graphics card is not supported well on Wayland. I actually downgraded from 25.10 back to 24.04 to solve some wild display lag problems.
I’ve had a bastard of a time with Nvidia drivers in the past few weeks, though I’m honest enough to accept that a big chunk of that could well be a combination of user error, and that I have a fairly old 1060 GPU.
I’ve got a really old one, a 1060 or 1070 I forgot. Zero issues
I made the mistake of updating to Kubuntu 26.05, and that was that. Dunno how, dunno why, but I could not load into a desktop. Tried uninstalling the nvidia drivers and reinstalling, but nope.
Ended up wiping it and starting again with Arch, and even that wasn’t particularly plain sailing. Had to roll back to an earlier driver.
I’m happy to accept that it’s probably user error, but man, they don’t make it easy.
It’s the 1060. They still work, I’ve got one in my server, but I couldn’t get mine to run with recent drivers.
I switched to Linux because the nvidia drivers on windows got so bad my GPU was crashing once every boot. On Linux I regularly have significantly worse performance (especially in VR) but its more stable. I’m fine with a lower fps rather than just getting kicked out of games when the driver crashes.
Would be nice if they worked on those performance issues, though.
Nope. Zero issues here on three different machines.
Drivers can be weird though and small differences can be all it needs to cause massive issues.
No, they work just fine for me on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. They load and compile in updates and that’s all there is.
No issues here either, I screwed up a driver update leaving Debian repos to actual Nvidia repos but other than that no issues
Nvidia drivers have worked fine for me on Mint, Parrot, and Artix. The only downside is they are pretty bloated and want to be loaded early in the boot process, so it adds several seconds to the initramfs load.
I haven’t tried compiling the image without them, mostly because it’s only a few seconds on boot and I don’t enjoy repairing broken boot images.
I’m gaming on grandpa Debian using nVidia’s CUDA repository for driver updates and I’m sitting fat and happy. Ignore instructions to install kernel headers for your specific kernel and just use the
linux-headers-amd64meta-package and it will automatically install new headers when the kernel updates. DKMS will rebuild the nvidia module for the new kernel and now kernel and nvidia driver updates are seamless. Performance is not noticeably different from when I was on Windows.The only improvement at this point would be kernel-level integration like AMD has so I don’t need to add a repository, but aside from that I honestly don’t see room for improvement.
Since I started using arch I’ve been fine. Ubuntu was rough though. Since Ubuntu and derivatives are mostly considered beginner friendly I can see how it might be a bigger issue. Maybe it is also a problem with older cards that don’t get as many updates.
2-3 years ago when I tried Fedora (I think shortly before Fedora 41 released)? Yeah, after a few hours of figuring out how to get them installed I had serious screen artifact issues still, and ultimately ended up back on Windows.
Trying Bazzite a couple months ago with the drivers preinstalled and functional out of the box? No problems since then, games just work (except Crimson Desert for a month, but I didn’t actually care to play it so that was fine), and I can actually focus on learning Linux without stressing over whether I can play my games.
Yes it never worked right. Specially in all shitty laptops with a discrete nvidia card and how they all had different ways to be integrated. At least for personal laptops I only buy ones with simple integrated graphics, but was always a shitty situation with work laptops. It was particularly fun knowing that the hdmi port was only connected to the nvidia card so if I disabled the nvidia card on the bios basic shit like that wouldn’t work. Let’s not even mention how it was constantly crashing for sleep or when waking up.
But performance according to benchmarks is much worse than on windows.
In AMD case it is higher on Linux if you exclude RT
I remember reading somewhere (but I can’t find it now) that they were working on that with incremental improvements in each release.
I had a problem on my work laptop with them about five years ago, but rolling back fixed it. Never on my personal machines.
Edit: TBF, I’ve never had a personal laptop with an nVidia card. I generally prefer to build my own desktops, though I do have a laptop. It has an AMD GPU, also with no problems.
nah i used mint for years with nvidia, it got good at least a couple years ago. i still have a thinkpad with nvidia running ultramarine, and i haven’t thought about the drivers even once after installing.
on the dumber side of the fence, sister was complaining about nvidia drivers being shitty on winslop, now she switched to amd and the drivers are way shittier.
funny how it turned this way.
It’s been fairly good for me on bazzite with my Nvidia card. I have to set some launch options in Steam from time to time to make HDR work but otherwise I’m happy (I had Nvidia issues on a different machine using Ubuntu but switched to different drivers and things improved)
No.
Upgraded to an AMD card and suddenly Linux became perfectly reliable.
I had a 3060 and it wasn’t that Linux wasn’t reliable but it occasionally would receive an update that would require a video card driver update as well. I bought a 9070xt, sold the 3060, and haven’t had a single issue since.
Yeah, the nVidia shituation is much better than a decade+ ago, nowdays I just have to manually pause upgrades (of drivers, kernel, or both) for a few weeks once evey two years or so.
I need to buy me some AMD. And AMD/Intel needs to build some high end GPU (for consumers I mean).
Still has an issue with HDMI speed since HDMI is a proprietary spec and they don’t allow 2.1 in open source drivers so it’s stuck on 2.0 speed. Displayport is very good though.
Same. Hopefully AMD still bothers making GPU with…is it 1% market share while Intel gave up entirely again? Dire.
ugh even worse if you have a hybrid laptop. integrated amd and discrete nvidia.
Kids, learn from me, do NOT buy an ASUS ROG Strix. less than 5 years old and thing is already on its deathbed with constant reboots and hanging at POST.
I’ll do you one better: do not buy ANYTHING made by Asus. That stuff’s built to fail as fast as possible.
Me with my Asus ROG Ally running Bazzite: 💀
Same! it runs fine
Hey, if you already bought it, keep using it as long as it serves you. I’m still using the asus laptop that taught me this lesson, even after its touchscreen failed completely (about a month after the end of warranty) and it has a whole bunch of issues to watch out for, like sometimes staying partially on after shutdown and overheating in my bag. But it can still compute and run Linux Mint fine, so I’m not throwing it away. Just covered the asus logo with a sticker to save some face.
But now that you know, don’t buy anything new by asus. I hope for you that your Ally stays good for as long as you use it, but my experience and others’ suggests that in a year or two it’ll start to show its many flaws. The touchscreen is pretty important for a device like that, isn’t it? Good luck.
Thanks!
I have a feeling that Asus can have like QC issues, unlike Dell. I have heard of bad and good stories about Asus. One good thing is they offer H/W at significantly cheaper rates which makes it very lucrative for the lower segment of the market. Also, Linux support on my Ally and my Asus laptop has been great.
PS: I am not a Asus fanboy. In fact I might buy a Macbook next time.
Yup, they have amazing specs for relatively low prices. The catch, as we agree, is in the QC.
So far i’ve always had good luck with their motherboards, granted those are the only things from asus that i’ve bought, and my current motherboard is from 2019 i think.
As a single data point to the contrary, I’ve been an ASUS guy for 15 years and always recommend to friends and family. I have an ROG Ally, all my Mboards are ASUS, same with my networking gear. I have an ASUS monitor from 2010 that my Dad still uses.
They provide more settings to tweak out of the box than most of the other tech companies in the same price range.
yeah I learned that first hand. shit company with shit product.
I have one of those, and my solution was to permanently disable the Nvidia card in favor of integrated graphics. Yeah…
I don’t think that is a function of the nvidia GPU save that ANY discrete GPU will cause increased wear on battery and heat. Also something that starts out with 6 hours battery and now has 2 is a lot less useful than something which had 10 and now has 6.
Just put Fedora on my desktop with an RTX 5060 a couple weeks ago. The Nvidia drivers were easy to install but they borked a bit later and it took me an hour or two to fix unfortunately. And sleep doesn’t work at all.
Still, the Nvidia driver issues are secondary to the WiFi issues that I’ve spent so many hours trying to get work, and every time I think it works for good, it breaks again. I’m buying a dongle with a Mediatek MT7601U and hopefully this fixes the WiFi issues for good.
My Nvidia driver has worked flawlessly in Fedora for the past 3 years. Not a single issue.
The people who are yapping about this kind of stuff literally haven’t even looked around or explored any of the options. Nvid drivers running flawlessly for years.
I’ve tried 6 different distros on my pc with nvidia graphics and none of them worked the way they shoudl have.
What distros have you actually tried? And what does “not working like they should have” actually mean?
I tried Fedora, Debian, Bazzite, Nobara, CachyOS and some others I cannot recall. Not working ranged from jot being able to get through initial setup (fedora after install), not being able to install at all, unexplained graphical glitches everywhere and performance under any kind of load being worse than playing on a laptop.
I’ve used nearly every one of those distros and I’ve never had problems. Based on what you’re describing, it doesn’t sound like problems that exist inside the driver. Best of luck to you.
I’ve hobestly given up on linux for my desktop at least for a while. Mihht try it again in a year or so but rn it just does not seem destined to be.
I’ve tried several times over the years. My laptop has been running fedora for 4 years now
Sure bro, all the endless people having issues with those shitty drivers are at fault. Nvidia is making a whole new driver because they just love to do it, not because the old one is a huge mess.
I’m doing my best helping family and friends with these things on various distros, but by now they all moved over to AMD or Intel or are in the process of it; even swapping out RTX 3000 series cards because the driver keeps fucking up and the Wayland support is a hot mess. Every single time the constant issues and glitches vanished once the Nvidia was thrown out. Nvidia on Linux is just hot garbage.
I mean, if there are working drivers that don’t have issues, and you’re using those that do, it’s not entirely your fault, but also it’s your fault.
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There are graphical interfaces for it if you’re afraid of letters on the screen. You’re making it sound like it’s some kind of impossible ordeal, but even in shit distros (looking at you, Ubuntu) it’s just pressing checkboxes (or, OH HORROR, copy-pasting words in the terminal, I’m shaking even thinking about it right now).
And yeah, it’s nvidia’s fault for making shit drivers, and distros’ mainterner’s fault for choosing shit drivers to be included, but since good versions of the drivers exist, you gotta take some responsibility for not using them.deleted by creator
if there are working drivers that don’t have issues
There aren’t. Some distros come with Nouveau alone, which is often awfully slow or lags behind in support for new cards. Some by now ship with nouveau + NVK, which is still unsuitable for demanding tasks and has bugs as NVK is still beta. And some ship with the proprietary Nvidia driver which is a hot mess. Changing something about this usually ends up in a mess due to how the Nvidia driver has to install itself into the system every time an update runs, and the fact you have to basically rip out a kernel module for it (nouveau).
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How is he misinformed when he does not have problems? I had NVIDIA cards for more than 15 years, never an issue with the linux drivers. Then I got an AMD and the driver occasionally crashes, bringing the whole desktop down.
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Had nvidia spectacularly fail on Fedora
How did you get sleep to work?
I’m also on Fedora with a 5060 and that’s my only issue after getting it setup and fixing the initial black screen on boot. Runs games and my own CUDA code well.
I haven’t actually tried sleeping the system. It’s a desktop, so it isn’t something I generally do. I’ll give it a try later tonight and let you know what happens.
Warning, you might need to hard reboot because it won’t wake up from sleep
I just tested putting my desktop to sleep this morning and everything seems to have woken back up correctly.
Here’s the system summary if you’re curious:
You’re on a newer everything than me, except the hardware. I’m on Fedora 43, with kernel 6.19.11 (or 6.19.12? I don’t remember exactly), and driver version 580.x, with an RTX 5060. I’ll send a pic of the system info once I get home from work.
Note that I can’t update to Fedora 44 currently because my WiFi is borked.
Sorry I forgot yesterday, but here it is now:
I’m on nobara and it’s generally fine, until I try to plug in my TV via hdmi to game or watch tv from the bed. Idk if it’s just that TV, or if it’s having 3 displays, or even just mixing DP and HDMI, but it flips its shit when I do that. I plan to troubleshoot at some point when I’m not in such a cramped space.
I managed to get hibernate working on opensuse with an Nvidia card, so I guess I’m lucky as hell.
No you fucking didn’t.
I had to remember that I’m trans and furry and channel that energy during drive partitioning.
There are limits to a furrys power
Call me Icarus baby
No way I’m configuring that. It needs to position the same amount of space as your ram amount right?
I’ll just sleep or turn it off.
I made a dedicated hibernate partition on nvram, and gave it enough space for my cpu RAM and the DRAM, plus like ten percent. In the opensuse setup you give it a particular name, then you look up the right kernel config parameter and boom done.
This is even with the Nvidia drivers.
I was shocked too. I decided to that that after faffing around trying to get sleep working. 😄
Maybe Microslop is secretly paying Nvidia to be shit specifically on Linux?
Doesn’t even have to pay. With the way Microsoft pushes AI, Nvidia gets their share automatically.
To be fair the windows driver situation isn’t much better. last time I started windows on a computer I cared about, it tried to find a new driver for my mouse for some reason and in the process deleted all the profiles I had configured on the mouse
Mouse drivers are ridiculous. Over 1 GB for just a freaking mouse driver.
You mean the software package from the manufacturer and not a driver?
Of course, but the download is still labelled as “driver”, and it’s the only (official) way to get the full functionality of the mouse.
?????
I’m on endeavouros (arch) with an rtx 3060 and haven’t had any issues whatsoever in a few years, are people having more nvidia problems lately or something?
I had a similar setup (Endeavour OS + 3080). While most daily tasks worked fine I had some large annoyances.
- Monitor Sleep would sometimes prevent VRR from working afterwards
- Actual sleep would sometimes force me to reconnect my second monitor.
- Hybernation was completely broken
- VRAM swapping does not work at all, leading to stuttering instead of simply degraded performance.
I am sure I missed some more minor ones, but there were the main reasons I got an AMD card
Don’t know about ‘recently’, but I bought a new PC about 2 years ago with a 4070 super, spent about one and a half days trying to get Ubuntu to properly set up drivers, and ended up installing windows instead.
(Due to ongoing enshittification I am considering giving it another go with mint)
I would recommend endevour OS which is based on arch, so you have the latest drivers and kernel always. Ubuntu is always old and may not work properly. Try that one and things will likely just work out of the box.
It’s a mixed bag, most of the time the desktop cards work fine, but mobile gpus are a little more wonky. Had a desktop rtx 2070 super under endeavoros as well until the last 6 months (even on the sway community edition, which is wayland based), but I have to admit the rx 9070xt that replaced it was much easier to setup and get going with no fuss thus far (plus really easy to undervolt, so I don’t use a ton of power as well).
I believe I have the same GPU but the Ti version (I might be mistaken but it’s definitely 30xx ti) and I couldn’t get it to work on mint smoothly myself. Put my 7600 back in. Idk if it’s the distro or not. Followed instructions online and nothing worked. Maybe I was simply missing something simple but whatever the fix is isn’t intuitive for me.
Just to note: that I’ve only been using Linux for about a year now and have been learning as I go. I’m not a CS student or anything. Just a dude without a diploma working a blue collar job.
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Y’all I would happily take all yalls nvidia GPUs.
(Slackware has made using nvidia drivers easy for so long now I’m surprised the other distros haven’t fucking figured it out.)
Every distro makes this easy. Every single one. Some have to enable a separate repo for all proprietary shit which is the limit of the challenge.
But kernel upgrades? That’s where I’ve broken mine and gave up
Everyone on earth already uses DKMS for this installing a new kernel or driver triggers a rebuild.
The common fails are
- User has neither disabled secure boot nor set it up to accept to sign with a key your motherboard is configured to accept.
You MUST do one or the other
- User is using very new kernel with very old hardware. Support window is about 10 years for mainline. Legacy for 1-3 years. Beyond 11-13 years you are either using old kernels or third party patches.
Ex: Geforce 600 series from 2012 is stuck with nvidia driver version 470.x latest release 2024. Attempting to build against recent kernels released after 2024 may not work without patches but MAY work with up to 7.0 as of this message. See
I have a 3090 that I will replace with an AMD card the second it makes financial sense for me.
I’m in the same boat. As soon as I can get comparable performance at a price I can afford, I’m jumping ship from team green.
I’m having no trouble on mine on CachyOS thankfully. Playin my games just fine. I’m sad I didn’t kick Microslop sooner, it’s been great honestly with all the tinkering and control I have. Not only did I get a performance lift, but my PC actually feels…like it’s mine I guess?
I haven’t had issues in ages, with Fedora at least. My laptop has NVIDIA and my desktop has AMD. Both are pretty stable.
Regular desktop stuff and gaming usually works fine. Problems start cropping up when you try to use some more advanced GPU-powered apps, or do development yourself. I’ve encountered even older OpenGL apps that fail to start unless you force them to use the Mesa software renderer.
Yeah, usually the issue I’ve seen is when drivers are optimized for specific games to show off hardware performance and then another application or game tries to emulate that game to take advantage of that optimization, but then the optimizations change and the application now is creating conflicts and errors, just as am example. If drivers followed more open standards and optimized to those instead of trying to draw out a few more FPS to market incremental upgrades rather than all that proprietary junk, it probably would solve some of those issues. But otherwise unless the applications keep up with reverse engineering the proprietary stuff, doing that ends up binding the application to a specific driver version and/or hardware. There’s some value in optimizing specific hardware to specific software. It’s how MACs and iPhones and such have always been successful. But outside of controlled ecosystems like Apple, it is a big burden for app developers to not have reliable middle layers.
But not long ago it used to be that even just desktop environments like KDE and GNOME were super unstable on NVIDIA drivers. That seems to be a thing of the past, mostly, but older hardware does still have some of those issues and a lot of Linux users were brought to Linux to support older hardware. And so there still some bad reputation out there more than realistic expectations of a market that’s driven by today’s profit over keeping existing customers happy or future profit.
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More, it works on way, way more machines than Windows 11 does, so is it really that bad that some edge cases and 20 year old hardware still doesn’t work well.
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Same with Arch, they were slower to adopt Wayland but stability has been fine for the last decade.
