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.)

nottheengineer,

And in addition to that, it’s the only thing that breaks on my system that isn’t my fault.

My next GPU will definitely be AMD unless Intel catches up very quickly.

Blackmist,

I would have thought Intel would be decent on Linux. It falls behind on Windows because it doesn’t have all the years of broken game fixes baked into the drivers like AMD and nVidia have, but isn’t all the Linux gaming done through Vulkan wrappers around DirectX?

ozymandias117,

Intel has the best software support - AMD just has more powerful hardware and good enough software support

nvidia has the best hardware on paper, but no software support

A large number of games support Linux natively thanks to Valve’s pushes, and use OpenGL

DXVK (directx to vulkan) is one of the more popular translation layers for other games

Intel also uses DXVK on Windows to help with older versions of DirectX (primarily DX9 afaik) on their ARC cards

30p87,

Hyped for the RX 7700/7800 XT, cuz they either replace my previous goal of a 4k capable card or bring down prices for the 6900/6950 XT a bit.

ascense,

I run Pop_OS with a temperamental Nvidia GPU that is unstable at factory clock speeds, but solid when I reduce the power limit by 5-10%. The only recurring annoyance I have with pop is that the flatpak GreenWithEnvy breaks after every GPU driver update and requires a manual flatpak upgrade to fix.

Similarly for my work laptop also running pop on nvidia, the big frustration is again nvidia related. Battery life is poor since hybrid graphics doesn’t work and external displays only work with the discrete graphics card.

SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT,

My embedded AMD GPU has been unusable under Ubuntu. Constant crashes/freezes. When trying to find a workaround (unsuccessfully), I found lots of other people with slight variations of the same problem - same symptoms, but different root causes… seems like at any time there are several system-breaking bugs and every time one is removed another is introduced. You just have to hope your kernel happens to be one that happens to work with your specific config.

My next platform will be Intel-based.

bitwolf,

There’s been a long standing amdgpu bug over the past year, there is a Kernel flag that fixes it mostly. Haven’t had issues since the latest mesa and adding this flag. (RDNA3)

uis,
@uis@lemmy.world avatar

Can you use AMD CPU and Intel dGPU?

Nanabaz2,

Which embeded gpu?

nottheengineer,

Just ubuntu or AMD APUs in general?

SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT,

It works on Windows, no idea how other distros behave but judging by all the issues people were reporting, even if this specific issue doesn’t happen on other distros, you’ll get bitten by something else.

Sina,

Of you have a thousand year old laptop with an amd embedded you can have such problems. Don’t draw the wrong conclusions about current Amd.

SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT,

It’s less than 3 years old. If it was any newer the argument would be “you can’t expect such new hardware to be supported”.

Molecular0079,

I don’t get why people bringing up AMD issues always get down voted. The bias is real. I too am getting constant freezes with my Radeon 680M that have gone unresolved for almost a year.

Quite a few people are experiencing this so it isn’t an isolated issue: gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/2220

michaelrose,

A few reasons. It’s received wisdom that AMD are the good guys because in the Intel / AMD slog they are the underdogs fighting the good fight and bringing good affordable products to all vs intel who has historically behaved in a sleazy underhanded and anti-competitive fashion and when they bought ATi they moved ATi from a maker of shitty proprietary poorly supported pieces of shit to an open source friendly maker of acceptable GPUS.

Since Nvidia is the bad guy in that fight it would be handy if Nvidia was also badly supported buggy, inferior. The fact that Nvidia is actually more stable, well supported, and generally better is somewhat a fly in the ointment.

It’s especially humorous when its coming from users of a permanent beta distro like arch where the kernel update process is that the new kernel is pushed extremely quickly after release. Expert arch users realize that means they are their own QA as far as out of tree modules. Actually stable distros express what is known to work as dependencies such that you trivially get something that is known to work when you press go. They also don’t run the kernel release that was cut this morning.

Meanwhile users of arch derived distros, who may or may not claim to be running arch while believing their distro is ubuntu with faster updates yell that nvidia is broken when 6.3 doesn’t work the day it was cut with nvidia using a driver that doesn’t claim to support 6.3. The fact that this dependency is known but not encoded into arch packages isn’t an Nvidia problem.

Even Manjaro a distro run by folks who once told their users to set their clocks back because they forgot to renew their SSL Cert figured out they can avoid almost as much trouble as smart people can avoid by actually reading by just being lazy and not pulling changes instantly.

gataloca,

I love this comment! Yeah it’s true, I’m the arch linux user you’re describing! So is there a good middle ground according to you? Where we can have faster updates, high application support and high customization without the downsides of arch that you describe?

Molecular0079,

I am actually running Arch and have had very little issues with Nvidia, but plenty with my AMD GPUs.

!deleted120991,

deleted_by_author

    •
    wim,

    Same. Everything just works great out of the box.

    I got both an AMD desktop and laptop GPU and I’ve had 0 issues with either. It’s been so refreshing.

    bobman,

    Do graphically-intensive programs use the dedicated GPU by default?

    With nvidia, we have to prepend prime-run to have program we want to use the dGPU. I’m curious if AMD has a similar restriction.

    uis,
    @uis@lemmy.world avatar

    Thank you for not blaming maintainers who have no controlover nvidia idiocy.

    Also why not mesa?

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @uis I didn't blame anyone particularly. I am just upset about the current situation as a Nvidia user. And it's a warning to anyone who thinks about getting a Nvidia card on Linux.

    Not sure why Mesa. It does not have the proprietary driver in it, does it?

    uis,
    @uis@lemmy.world avatar

    It does not, that’s why I am suggesting it.

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @uis Performance is the problem. I play games and there is no alternative to proprietary drivers.

    uis,
    @uis@lemmy.world avatar

    What card you are using?

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @uis GTX 1070. The new open source driver from Nvidia does not support the 10x series, if your question should lead to that. But does not matter, because yesterday all PC parts of my new build has arrived and I will set it up this weekend. AMD+AMD now. Finally done with these Nvidia frustration.

    uis,
    @uis@lemmy.world avatar

    nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html says 1070 works fine, but without reclocking(on minimal speed). All thanks to nvidia DRM. And here DRM is not Direct Rendering Manager.

    I will set it up this weekend. AMD+AMD now. Finally done with these Nvidia frustration.

    Congrats!

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @uis I know about nouveau which is community developed. This is what I meant with the performance. It's not near on the same level as the proprietary. For gaming, this is not an option. But I thank you for the suggestions you made.

    The best benchmarks I found is for the 20xx series, but look at the results to understand how big the difference is: https://www.phoronix.com/review/opensource-turing-3d/2

    Dota 2:

    • Noveau gets 7 fps
    • Proprietary gets over 100 fps

    That's the level of difference we speak about.

    Doomguy1364,
    @Doomguy1364@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    You can manually remove all of the previous drivers and their GL32 counterparts, your flatpaks will still run as long as you have the newest drivers.

    I’m not sure why they don’t get caught by the --unused flag, but they are definitely not needed from the flatpaks I’ve tested with.

    gataloca,

    If you have several kernels you might want to disable the fallback kernels. You do so in the .preset files in /etc/mkinitcpio.d/

    But yeah this is the downside of using flatpaks. That’s why I think it’s better to avoid flatpaks and other similar sandbox environments. I know the Linux community are desperate for the increased stability and supposed benefits to security but you’re paying the price in worse performance and high disk usage.

    skulbuny,
    @skulbuny@sh.itjust.works avatar

    I switched from a 3070 to an Rx 7900XT on Sunday. Uninstalling all of nvidia shit was great. I used linux-zen so that meant using nvidia-dkms. So happy I don’t have to deal with that anymore. And yeah, I use a lot of flatpaks, so removing all of those nvidia drivers was also a great feeling. And now I can use Wayland!

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @skulbuny I do not use zen and get the dkms. But honestly, the twice-dkms installation (one for each Kernel) isn't too bad. The real issue for me is with Flatpak. I'm currently in the process of choosing and building new PC. Wish I could afford 7900XT, but together with an entire PC building it gets too expensive for me. Looking forward to AMD!

    hellvolution,

    Im not a PhD on Arch, but, why are you using Flatpak to install a driver that is available at AUR??? When it comes to drivers, try to stick to your distro ones, unless you really know what you are doing!

    ozymandias117,

    That’s how Flatpak works…

    Flatpak applications will use the graphics library installed from Flatpak

    If you have an nVidia card, you’ll need the nVidia Flatpaks to run applications

    If you have Intel/AMD, you’ll get a Mesa Flatpak

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @hellvolution I do not install the driver in Flatpak, it does it automatically. Each application can depend on specific driver versions I guess and that is how it ends up installing multiple versions. That makes it quite robust to be honest, because if a new driver version sucks the application can just request to use an older version in example.

    Before accusing people not knowing what they are doing, maybe you should learn about the technology you talk about. There are reasons why to use Flatpak over native Arch packages. One reason is in example I have installed kdenlive, but do not want the entire KDE suite, services and applications installed and running on my system as well.

    hellvolution,

    Yeah, so you’re telling me you don’t want the entire idea suite installed (which can be reduced by installing only the plasma version), but you are ok having 500 different Nvidia drivers, which are at least 350MB each… grats! Continue to use flatpak!!! 😂🤣😂🤣😂😂

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @hellvolution I don't know what you are hallucinating, but my post was ranting about the Nvidia drivers. I did not choose to install all of them, they are installed and maintained automatically in Flatpak. But I chose not to install the KDE suite on my native system, because that always causes pain with other suites and installations. That's the good part of Flatpak. There are a few reasons to use Flatpak.

    But the Nvidia driver situation in Flatpak is ridiculous! But you know what, that does not matter anymore, because today my new PC parts will arrive and I can build from scratch. AMD through and through!

    worsedoughnut,
    @worsedoughnut@lemdro.id avatar

    My exact solution to this on Endeavour was to just stop using flatpaks lol.

    Literally everything I used from flathub was also either on the AUR or trivial to install manually from the host GitHub.

    michaelrose,

    You have a bunch of duplicated stuff because flatpak is a piece of shit. With traditional packaging apps supporting your platform would get exactly one choice. Support the fucking version of nvidia that everyone else gets to or fuck off. In all likelihood all your shit would work work with the most recent release but because they have the option to be lazy fucks and make you download Nvidia 7 times this is your life now. Also if dkms takes appreciable time you either need to stop running Linux on a toaster or delete some of the 17 kernels you are hoarding for some reason. You need like 2 the one that you know works and the new one you just installed.

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @michaelrose Thank you for your help. Much appreciated.

    Herbstzeitlose,

    Gardotd, is that you?

    michaelrose,

    I do not know who that is.

    harrim4n,

    https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/21b3f6d6-1150-47bb-bc21-15c7325caa38.jpeg

    LeFantome,

    Wow

    OsrsNeedsF2P,

    As an app developer, we provide the source, binaries, and a Flatpak, but we sure as hell aren’t going to help you debug the Nvidia drivers on some random distro if you don’t pick Flatpak.

    michaelrose,

    Why would you need to? Apps might likely need functional drivers for your hardware to exist but most things aren’t going to directly relate to or depend on a particular version of the nvidia driver. If it does you might be a bad developer.

    OsrsNeedsF2P,

    Well the main reason is we target a certain graphics API which Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all support, but driver updates do from time to time have regressions and we have to work with Mesa to fix them.

    It’s also not just graphics. Our app depends on a certain library version as well, and if you don’t use Flatpak, that becomes an issue for some of our users to grab too.

    ProtonBadger, (edited )

    I have an alias I call "upd" that runs "yay ; flatpak update", I just run that, press Y at the first prompts and then let it run in the background while I do other work. It really doesn't matter at all how long it takes. I do have NVidia but generally I don't feel it takes very long as we don't get new kernels every day. You could use the linux-lts kernel for much more rare kernel updates.

    It's a bit like bittorrents, I don't need them to download in 30sec, I start it and return to check on it whenever I think of it.

    I have changed my opinion on flatpak btw, I really like that the apps are not spread all over my system but instead sandboxed neatly, have fewer dependency versioning issues and it's really easy to use.

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @ProtonBadger The entire update process takes 20 minutes or so (never timed it), at least sometimes. I also had an alias before, but recently rewrote it as a script to do similar things, including pacman, yay, flatpak, rustup and a few other things. And from all of this stuff, most of the time its flatpak that inflates the update process time.

    ProtonBadger, (edited )

    That's abnormal, it shouldn't be like that. My flatpak rarely has updates (compared to Arch/yay) and they're quite fast, still less than a minute even if there's updates to the NV libs (I didn't time it). There must be some kind of particular issue? What's your setup?

    Looking at it - I got flatseal, chrome, firefox, thunderbird, dropbox, steam, joplin, cryptomator, mesa, NV libs, gimp, discord, resynthesizer, libreoffice and some other bits on flatpak. It's on an SSD, Internet 150Mbps. Is it installation or download that's slow for you? With it being 20min I would guess there's a problem with the download speed from the server, routing issue to flathub, etc? Flatpak is not that much of a slog.

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @ProtonBadger No, I have full download speed for my connection, so it's not download speed. Everything downloads at full speed. The issue is, that so many driver versions are downloaded and updated. Mind you, this is not with every update so many. My point is, the entire update process could be done very fast if it wasn't Nvidia requiring so many downloads and installation process. Everything else is done quickly.

    elouboub,
    elouboub avatar

    Uses NVIDIA

    Imaaaagine!

    Seriously though, I feel for you. NVIDIA is shit and while you're dealing with this, I hope you know which vendor you'll not be giving money to in the future. Fuck NVIDIA.

    Sina, (edited )

    I just switched from my 1060 3g to an rx580, because 3 gigs of vram is nothing on Linux. But good god, it’s so much better to use AMD on Linux. Nvidia has fixed a tremendous amount of crap over the past 3 months, pretty much all the major issues with Wayland, Prime displays etc are not history. Many of these were fixed literally just weeks ago, but as long as their driver has to be installed separately with a kernel module hook, it will never compare.

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @elouboub It's AMD. 100% sure. And the best part is, the situation with Nvidia is nowadays improved. So this is the current best case we have...

    ProtonBadger,

    NVIDIA is shit

    I would call that an exaggeration. It's not perfect sure, but it has finally improved a lot in the last year and it works for some. I had to get a new gaming laptop earlier this year and the only good option I could afford had an NV card. It was a great deal from Bestbuy certified open box, $500 off (I love those open box deals with 30day return).

    It works well, I play Guildwars2 and BG3 flawlessly through XWayland+proton with great performance. Maybe it works well because I put it into Dedicated Nvidia mode, instead of using Optimus? (I never liked Optimus)

    Sure it's not perfect, I get graphics glitches in KDE if bringing the laptop out of sleep, funny colors and a mouse with a funny trail, but I don't need to use sleep, I boot it in the morning and shut it down in the evening, it's no biggie for my use-case.

    1984,
    @1984@lemmy.today avatar

    I was wondering what the fuss was about until I read flatpak. I don’t use those, no reason to on Arch since everything is in the AUR. But it was interesting to read.

    MaximumPower,

    Every major Linux dist has community repository, arch isn’t special. Arch users are like people doing CrossFit, dude No one cares if you use arch.

    1984,
    @1984@lemmy.today avatar

    Oh that’s where you are wrong… Arch is actually really special. No other distro comes close to being so easy to install the latest version of software. I’ve run almost all major Debian based linuxes also and they are mostly frustrating in comparison.

    You just can’t find the software you need, or you have to download it manually, meaning it’s not even updated by your package manager. People resort to flatpak and the likes just to be able to have the software they need since it’s not packaged in any other way.

    Arch is just better and I highly recommend it.

    MaximumPower,

    I’m not new to Linux, I know what arch is. And Debian isnt the only alternative to arch. Like I said every Major distribution has community repositories.

    Ubuntu has packstall, Fedora rpm fusion, opensuse probably has some aswell, void has community repositories in xbps. And guess what they are all pretty up to date.

    I’m not going to install a Linux distro based on the community repository, I’m not even running any of the major distro, because I don’t care what packages are available. I have a few programs that I run, and it’s not that hard to make other programs work, when you know what to do.

    MyNameIsRichard,
    @MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml avatar

    . No other distro comes close to being so easy to install the latest version of software

    cough Tumbleweed

    redcalcium,

    AUR is not the same as the community repository on other distros though. Community repositories on other distros contains pre-built packages supplied by community members, while AUR contains build scripts that let you download the source code directly from the vendor website, compile it into a package and install it in your system with a single command, so you’ll often get the bleeding edge version faster than most community repositories on other distros.

    MaximumPower,

    Wrong again, xbps does this better than Pacman. Packtinstall works the same way, dude you have no Idea

    redcalcium,

    What are you talking about? We’re talking about AUR, right? not Pacman?

    MaximumPower,

    Bro, why do I even bother. makepkg is part of Pacman, you use pacman to install the package… Pacman is arch Linux package manager the same tool you use to install from aur.

    redcalcium,

    That’s just the tool to build the packages. The AUR itself is a repository of user-submitted build scripts where anyone can signup and publish their pkgbuild scripts, totally incomparable with community repository on other distros which ship binary packages instead of build scripts. Pacstall is the closest of alternative, but they are not made by canonical (actually, who made them? Their privacy policy seems to by copy-pasted from a boilerplate unrelated with the actual service provided by pactstall) and aren’t shipped with the distro by default.

    MaximumPower,

    You have no idea, what you are talking about. And it’s starting to become to cringe to keep going, you’re either a troll or clueless.

    Aur is not supported by Arch Linux. It’s a community repository that has build scripts yes, but you have either one download the build scripts and use pacman to install them, two use a pacman wrapper like yaurt to fetch them and install them for you using guess what pacman!

    Just because the tool isn’t supported by the distro doesn’t matter in this case, because they solve the same issue!! You are installing packages from a repository that the community oversees. Your case for arch Linux was installing the latest version of an application.

    Have you even pulled your head out of arch linux ass and looked att xbps? No, because I’m starting to doubt if you would understand it, and there are other distros that offer the same thing.

    You keep straw maning

    redcalcium, (edited )

    I was addressing the fact that AUR is a repository of build scripts that fetch and compile them, which make it very different than other community repository. An AUR entry could be not updated for months, but because it fetch a the source code directly from source, it often will fetch the latest version of the app regardless the when was the last time the build script itself updated, which is not the case on other binary community repo (which install whatever available in the repo instead of fetching directly from the apps’ maker).

    You keep straw maning

    You are the one that keep strawmanning to compare pacman with other package manager when I’m not talking about the package manager itself, but about the different approach of arch user repository. And no, I’m not actually an arch user anymore. I never even once say that pacman is good or even better than others, but you somehow assume that I say so.

    Have you even pulled your head out of arch linux ass and looked att xbps?

    Actually I haven’t heard about xbps or tried void linux yet, so thanks for mentioning it.

    MaximumPower,

    Yeah no, most build scripts if they are worth their salt, will absolutely not pull the latest package from a given source. Because that is insane, 99% of the time they validate the download with a checksum, meaning that you have to update the checksum in the build script, or in the case of multiple downloads - multiple checksums.

    Yes pacman is the underlying technology that enables aur to exist.

    redcalcium,

    Those ideal build scripts would also get updated when the the source published a new version, but alas, being maintained by random users means the build scripts not updated in timely matter sometimes. In that situation, having another build scripts that say, pull git head, is often useful than none at all. It’s up to the users to evaluate and use whichever is appropriate for them.

    MaximumPower,

    You are just guessing. No, they manually update those, because you need the checksum.

    A tip never use any tool that downloads something without checking a checksum, because you have no idea if the source you are downloading is still the same, it could be anything.

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @1984 Unfortunately not everything is in the AUR or I do not want to trust everyone on the AUR. And there are other reasons to use Flatpak over native packaging (including AUR):

    • kdenlive and Krita: I do not want to install the entire suite and dependencies of KDE.
    • bottles: The Flatpak version is the recommended one by the devs and the only supported one I think.
    • xemu: Yes it's also available on, but I do not know who the uploader and manager of this binary is. While the Flatpak version an official package is.
    • zeal: Same reason as xemu.

    And that's basically it (ok there is Flatseal too... but that does not count to our discussion). Everything else is installed through native packaging. So there is not much reason to use Flatpak and I just started with it recently. But there are sometimes reasons for.

    radioactiveradio,

    Eyyy, i just updated all that too!

    Sina,

    If you use the Zen kernel there is no reason to keep the regular one around.

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @Sina I have LTS and the newest one.

    MalReynolds,
    @MalReynolds@slrpnk.net avatar

    I always did, saved my ass a couple of times when Zen broke.

    Destraight,

    I don’t get these kind of problems with windows

    thingsiplay,
    thingsiplay avatar

    @Destraight Windows does not have Flatpak.

    Destraight,

    Ok

    Atemu,
    @Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

    That’s what you get when you build unstable kernel APIs. Meanwhile in sane land: docs.kernel.org/gpu/drm-uapi.html

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