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.
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.
Nvidia for compute* has always been fine on Linux. It’s Nvidia for an actual display that’s been the biggest problem.
No, it has not „always been fine” - I’ve worked with people who disabled auto updates on their dev machines just to keep a specific kernel & driver version working together. Circa 2016 :)
I was indeed setting up nvidia and cuda for ML around 2018 and it was not as straight forward or easy as it is today. It was quite annoying and error prone, at least for me who was setting it up on my own for the first time.
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.
Good news, they're going away. AMD is focusing entirely on Mesa now.
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.
I think the experience you were lead on to was the open source driver built into the kernel.
With that the moving parts are the kernel, and the amd-gpu-firmware. The open source setup is much more reliable, and if a bug ever arises, it tends to get fixed quickly. You update, and it's gone.
Using the proprietary driver is difficult with regardless of vendor.
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.
I'm not who you were replying to, and I'm by no means a beginner... but I just got the Framework Desktop with the AMD Strix Halo APU and I initially installed Fedora and could not get games to run through Steam. I eventually installed Nobara, and overall I don't like it, but it played every game I tried without any fuss.
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.