I’ve been trying Linux Mint on my old dell laptop with an nvidia GPU and it’s been just one impossible issue after the other.
Even games that have native linux versions like Valheim don’t run if I’m running off the GPU (but run if i switch to the integrated intel gpu but with terrible performance). Some games that work with proton work fine but have tons of weird issues like not being able to type specific characters on the keyboard, or the game and the entire OS just randomly freezing after 15-20 minutes - it happened in both warframe and guild wars 2 for example. Every time it happened I had to do a hard reboot since it was completely unresponsive.
I tried installing bottles and couldn’t get through the basic setup of the GOG launcher without getting black screens in it. There were some workarounds with no-sandbox launch arguments at one point but I think I eventually gave up on it. Steam had tons of issues with launchers freezing, or steam itself getting stuck on constant shader updates every day I start the game.
I tried changing proton versions, installing wine and lutris manually, changing nvidia drivers (randomly trying other one since there’s no useful info online about which to pick or which ones even work…) and it never got to a satisfactory point. I still have no idea which drivers im supposed to be using (if it’s not the recommended ones that come with Mint), or how to properly update them manually.
I’ve had steam somethines just not run at all, I run it and nothing happens. I see it in the process manager, kill it ,restart it… it gets the temporary update popup and then disappears with no error message whatsoever.
I actually own a steam deck and I never had any major issues with it, so my only conclusion is that this time it’s the fault of either linux mint (which is supposed to be the stable, no-nonsense OS), or the different hardware - probably the GPU.
So yeah… is the conclusion wrong, or is it really simply pointless to try linux with nvidia?
edit: hardware info:
GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile
CPU: i7-7700HQ
I’m currently running Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon
Nvidia drivers in use are the latest ones available from the driver manager (currently nvidia-driver-550).
Will try PopOS! next
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For gaming, you should be using the most current version of nvidia’s proprietary drivers that supports your GPU, unless that GPU is really old. Have a look at this page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/
If your GPU isn’t listed there, use the most recent driver you can find.
If your GPU is on the 470.xx supported list, try 470.223.02, as that seems to be the last in the series.
If your GPU is on the 390.xx supported list, try 390.157.
If your GPU is on one of the other lists, it’s a really old chipset and you should be using the Nouveau driver that’s built into the kernel.
If you’re using the nvidia proprietary drivers on a system that also has Nouveau installed, make sure you’ve blacklisted Nouveau so that you’re loading the correct driver.
Dual-graphics laptops are a bit of a bear to work with under Linux generally. Good luck.
Short answer: no. I’m using Linux Mint with an Nvidia card and it works great. From the games you’ve mentioned I’ve played Guild Wars 2 and Warframe with zero problems, they actually ran like on Windows where I had them installed before. Steam, Heroic Games Launcher, Bottles, Lutris - they all work fine for me.
Also some of the issues you’re describing don’t sound like a typical GPU problem. But sure, try a different distro, maybe your particular hardware setup doesn’t play nice with Mint.
Currently running Pop!_OS 22.04 with a 3090 GPU, and it purrs like a happy cat. Getting significantly better performance than when the same hardware ran Windows 10.
I actually own a steam deck and I never had any major issues with it, so my only conclusion is that this time it’s the fault of either linux mint
Isn’t Steam Deck use AMD and not NVIDIA? Btw, playing CS:GO2 on Nvidia 3070 Ti on Linux desktop using driver version 545 doesn’t give me a major issue so far.
It is, I’m just saying that even games that worked fine on steam deck had issues on my nvidia laptop so I doubt its the game’s fault.
I wouldn’t say unusable but NVIDIA definitely makes things way more painful than they ought to be with their closed source drivers and general stubbornness to support newer technologies under Linux, see Wayland. Mint’s generally older packages also might be working against you.
In my experience, I’ve had the smoothest experiences with gaming focused/adjacent distros which just include the NVIDIA drivers out of the box, such as Nobara or Bazzite. Those just work for the most part with no user intervention, and you don’t even have to think about it.
I have some window resizing/tiling/moving lag spikes with KDE and notifications lag the whole system with kde/gnome. This sis apparently a bug in the nvidia driver. Besides that games run pretty much perfectly. The card gets hotter than on Windows with PoE but that’s basically it. For reference, I play PoE, league (for now), ffxiv, D2 mods, last epoch, some indie games, bg3,… I have a 3080 card and a ryzen 5800x processor.
Always using the newest proprietary driver of course.
I do believe you but I’ve only used Nvidia cards for over 20 years with Linux. Idk where all these difficulties people have with Nvidia on Linux come from. Every issue I’ve ever had with a GPU was from a hardware failure. Maybe something is busted.
It’s probably something with your OS.
People like to meme about Nvidia being unusable on Linux, but before switching to AMD I was running various Nvidia GPUs for more than a decade and they were always rock-stable.
Not my experience at all. Running :
- Ubuntu 23.10
- NVIDIA 525.147.05
- latest Steam stable (1705108172) with latest Proton
and I have been playing “flat” and VR games with no tinkering for years now. I honestly spent at most 1h on drivers or compatibility since I bought my desktop. In fact thinking back I probably spent more time on Windows years ago than now.
The keywords are “Linux Mint” and “old NVIDIA GPU”
Is Linux pretty much unusable with an Nvidia GPU?
So clickbait title?
I mean… “Linux” is just a Kernel XD “is Linux Mint unusable with Nvidia” may be more accurate.
But I dont know, to my knowledge Xorg and old GPUs should work. But I even get amdgpu errors on Fedora.
I have several machines with Nvidia GPUs, they are all working fine, one thing I like about Intel internal graphics that you can’t do with Nvidia is to use pass
through of virtual GPU’s to get OS’s in kvm-qemu virtual machines, giving the ability to play Windows video games in a virtual machine with usable performance.Have you not watched the famous Linus Torvalds video on this? If you haven’t, here’s a nice upscaled version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPh-5P4XH6o
But yeah, there’s a good reason why most of us here avoid nVidia.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=xPh-5P4XH6o
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Super not helpful, person. :[
Op, ignore this video. It’s old old news.
and in a later speech Linus praises nvidia for their support.
Nvidia is shit on linux. It works if you’re lucky or know what you’re doing but dont expect anything to work oob.
If anyone ever needs to decide if amd or nvidia on linux, its amd 11/10.
Nonsense. I ran NVidia for years before I upgraded to to a newish AMD card. Not perfect but it absolutely works even for gaming as my many many hours of KSP can attest.
Thats the most „it works for me so its fine“ take I‘ve seen in a long time.
There are fixes for most games in protondb titled „if you have an nvidia card“.
Astonishing how many completely out of touch comments happen on lemmy. „Confidently incorrect“ gets a new renaissance.
Then your take is equivalent to: “it does not work for me so it is shite.”
Utterly devoid of meaning, vague and useless.
Nice rhetoric but it doesnt work that way. As I just mentioned in the comment before, there are hundreds of reports saying nvidia doesnt work as well as amd, period.
So, despite your toxic attitude, I choose to educate you. Be better.
The support for NVIDIA hardware on Linux is not ideal at best. When I switched to all AMD I have since had a very smooth experience, especially with distro hopping.
In this thread: people gaslighting OP.
I’ve also had massive issues with the GTX660, up to the point of complete computer freeze and pressing the hardware shutdown button, as risky as doing that on a consistent basis is. Never again did I use Linux up until I went AMD.
Anecdotal, of course, but I’ve been gaming with almost zero big issues on POP! _OS with the baked in nVidia drivers since half a year ago. Both via Steam and via Lutris w/ Wine/ProtonGE. Some bugs here and there, but nothing that makes it impossible to get a satisfactory experience.
Of course it’s a different distro which you might not like, but if you really can’t make your games work on Mint do consider changing to POP! at least for the time being
