How bad are Nvidia GPUs for Linux really?

Most videocards aside from the really bleeding edge stuff are reasonably stable in linux. At least from my experiences with Fedora/Ubuntu over the last 6 years. Things can get complex for laptop hardware that has weird high-power/low-power hardware switching and other idiosyncratic setups that don't get much support.

Regarding dual-booting. Just install your OSes on separate physical drives and switch between them at boot time by launching your bios. Most bios have an option to select a hardware device to boot from that runs before any bootloader is read, so check with your motherboard book to see how to access it.

Just make sure to install the bootloader partition for each OS onto their drive as if that drive was the only one in the system.

I use an RTX4070 with my void linux system and I've not encountered a single GPU-related issue with running games, both pirated and on steam. Getting everything set up was a cakewalk, just installing the appropriate drivers via the default package manager

Also for dual booting, I hear people have problems with Windows messing up their Linux install. Is that a common problem, or a few people having bad luck? Is that avoidable?

Unless something changed in the last few years, it was a regular issue for me with Windows 10, it kept overwriting the boot partition with certain updates. Ignoring and reverting any non-standard user settings really is a staple of Win10.

The solution in my case was to install Linux and Windows on separate (physical) drives with their own boot partitions, set the Linux drive as primary boot in EFI config and let GRUB find the Windows boot partition with its own boot manager on the other drive automatically with I think the grub-install script. This worked first try without any manual settings, I did not have to do any manual changes like hungariantoast.

I think this is possible to do without having to have separate physical drives (it was just the easiest solution for me), EFI should be able to detect and select separate bootable partitions on one drive, and then it's just the case of having the first partition on the drive to be the Windows one, but then installing GRUB on the second one and booting into it. IIRC Windows shouldn't touch any bootable partitions that are behind it.

NVIDIA used to be the only game in town for gaming on Linux. That changed with the relase of amdgpu. This has made working with AMD cards much less painful than getting NVIDIA cards working, especially on a rolling distro.

And yes, windows will fuck with your bootloader. I don't dual boot anymore, so any advice I'd have for that is probably outdated.

I'm running Nvidia GPU since around 2012. I run Gentoo linux - rolling release distro. I never had any problems. GPU gives comparative numbers as it would on Windows machine (ie. in Cyberpunk) and it is smooth experience. I only used GTS450, GTX750, GTX960 and GTX1650 cards in all those years - no really high end stuff. There are tons of software features you may and will miss though. But basics graphics drivers works very well for me.

If you already have the hardware, which you do, I wouldn't stress over it - just go for it and see for yourself. You can buy some 256GB SSD for cheap and try Linux on that while disconnecting all oher drives, you don't have to nuke your PC (yet, when you don't know if it will work). This will prevent you from messing up Windows install and will prevent Windows messing up linux install (bootloaders...).

My friend has 7900XTX from AMD and uses Arch linux and is very pleased with the experience.

I haven't had many problems running Mint with my GTX 1060, but it's an older card and I don't game with it aside from a little emulation. Most of the problems I have had were fixed satisfactorily by adjusting settings, but again, I'm not taxing the hardware overmuch, so YMMV for sure.

In my own personal experience, the only issue I've had with NVIDIA GPUs on linux is the installation and maintaining of the driver. If you're using an Ubuntu-based distro, fine, the driver manager application thingy will do it for you, and you'll never have to think about it again. If you're using Debian, Fedora, or any other distro that I've ever tried, you're most likely going to have to do the whole process by yourself - which also means that you'll have to maintain it every time something goes wrong. Which eventually it might.

One of the issues the Linux community has with Nvidia is that the drivers are proprietary. Meaning no source code provided. So you can't see exactly what the drivers are doing, and need Nvidia to update them.

In my experience in the past Nvidia proprietary drivers generally work just fine on Linux. You may occasionally have some random black screen issues when booting up or resuming from suspend or something, but it mostly just works with some small annoyances every so often. If you tend to hold onto your hardware for a long time you may eventually run into an issue where the binary blob driver no longer supports your GPU, which can be annoying, especially since the old drivers that do support your GPU might not support new Linux kernel versions, so eventually you might get to the point where you can't upgrade your OS until you upgrade your hardware... Presumably this can be an issue with amdgpu as well, but since it's open source you can potentially hack it to work if you or somebody else really wants to. Occasionally there is some fight between Linux kernel devs and Nvidia that will break the drivers on bleeding edge kernels, but this isn't super common (and likely won't be an issue for you unless you're on a rolling release distro, which Mint is not).

In general AMD gpus are kind of hassle free on Linux and are more plug-and-play than Nvidia GPUs, but if you want to try Linux out I really wouldn't worry that much about having an Nvidia card. You likely won't have any problems, especially on a stable distro like Mint.

Given how much Nvidia GPUs are leveraged for LLM training, I'd expect stellar support in Linux. It's hard to imagine OpenAI, Amazon, Google, et al investing in Windows for all of their machines!

Anecdotally, I've not had any problem with my 2060 laptop but then I've only leveraged the GPU for Plex and, soon, running an LLM.

My experience with a desktop was generally fine in this setup. With a laptop, it was a lot of work that never quite got to where I wanted it.

In my case, the external display ports were wired through the GPU, so to get both the laptop display and external displays working properly (with screen scaling), I had to make the Nvidia GPU my primary and sacrifice my battery life. The alternative was to have no screen scaling, as if the Intel GPU was the primary and I scaled the Nvidia displays, the Nvidia GPU would have a disconnect between where it drew my mouse cursor and where the cursor actually was.

So if you're considering this on a laptop, my advice would be to set aside a good amount of time to figure this kind of setup out and tweak things.

My experience with a 3080 Ti FTW3 and Linux is that it sometimes won’t play nice with Wayland — for example a few months ago discovered VS Code is super glitchy under Nvidia+Wayland. To be clear, this is an Nvidia problem, not a Wayland problem because Wayland works fine on my Linux boxes with Intel iGPUs or AMD dGPUs. Nvidia has traditionally been a pain in the ass for Linux devs and this is no exception.

The other thing is that the proprietary Nvidia drivers can be a pain to maintain through updates on some distros. As someone else noted Ubuntu-based distros are fine here, and Fedora can be after some command line finagling though.

All that considered, if I were to run Linux full-time (currently I dual boot on the machine in question, staying in Windows most of the time) I’d almost certainly invest in an equivalent or more powerful AMD card to my 3080 Ti. I was leaning that direction anyway with all the RTX 4000 power connector nonsense.

As with dual booting, I hear people have problems with Windows messing up their Linux install. Is that a common problem, or a few people having bad luck? Is that avoidable?

Never had that issue myself. If you have a destkop, I would recommend dropping in a separate drive and using a separate EFI partition for your Linux install.

Going against the flow, I’m sadly going to have to report issues with my GTX 1080 on both Mint and Ubuntu, specifically regarding rendering in Cycles on Blender. It would detect my CPU without issue, and would allow me to render with the GPU, but without CUDA optimization which is a major draw of Nvidia cards in the first place. This was back in 2020 and then again in 2021. I have tried Mint since then (summer of 2023), but I still had issues getting CUDA to render on my currentt build’s 3070ti.

For other applications, such as games, I really had no issue, but with Blender specifically (both standalone and through a package manager) it did not ever want to detect the CUDA competent, which is significantly more efficient for Blender’s Cycles raytracing.

I plan on trying it again once I get a higher vram GPU, but Window’s Blender performance still seems relatively unmatched vs other OS’s for CUDA, which means I’m probably going to be paying an arm and a leg.

I know of several workarounds, and recognize that people with more free time might be able to get it to work, but I sculpt in my free time, and when I do (occasionally) render for clients, it’s imperative that everything works without issue and as efficiently as possible. At the moment, for my specific work case, Linux is not there (circa 2023).

I plan on doing a quick test run again come January prior to upgrading my system, just to see if there have been any changes that might affect my hardware choices, but I’m keeping my expectations low. As much as people hate to hear it, there is a massive benefit and reason to have Nvidia GPUs over the (significantly better on paper) AMD ones. More VRAM would help me significantly, but I personally find optimizing a scene for less VRAM less disruptive than optimizing a scene for less render time. And that goes for running Linux vs Windows. I would love a system that doesn’t track me, but I can’t rely on a system that might refuse to recognize a key feature of my hardware for any number of reasons.

I haven’t really had many issues with the proprietary Nvidia driver (using a 3090 and 2080Ti in the same machine), aside from the periodic attempts to try Wayland that invariably fail utterly due to stuff being broken and not having the time to go debug it. There’s some occasional weirdness but on the whole it’s been pretty stable. If you’ll mostly be playing games, chances are the Nvidia drivers will work fine - just note that some newly-released stuff might not work until Proton has a chance to patch things, and some Wayland stuff is really hostile to Nvidia users. For example, it took a few months for Starfield to be playable on an Nvidia GPU after release. Older stuff generally works fine (or if it doesn’t, it’s not the Nvidia driver that’s the issue).

That said, it’s not like I have any other option. If you want to do compute work on your GPU(s), you’re essentially forced to go with Nvidia. OpenCL is a joke, the ecosystem around Vulkan compute shaders isn't really usable, and ROCm doesn’t have broad compatibility so you have to be very careful to make sure you buy a card that supports it. Whereas CUDA works on all Nvidia cards, most distros, has a ton of good libraries and tooling, and is supported by most pre-written applications. I wouldn’t mind trying an AMD card because open graphics drivers are a good idea, but that’s not really an option until the GPU compute story improves.

Also, since some other people have mentioned it, this is all based on desktop hardware. I think there was some weirdness around hybrid graphics on laptops, but my knowledge there is almost a decade out of date so there’s a good chance that’s been fixed by now.

I also have Intel+Nvidia and have yet to find a single game that doesn't work for me, even after several years. Check the site ProtonDB to see how your favorite games fair.

I can't offer advice on dual booting as I haven't done that in years. I will say, however, to be sure you understand what Linux is and isn't. Its not meant to be Windows so if you're expecting it to be, you may become frustrated. I do agree that Linux Mint is an excellent distro for somebody coming from Windows, though.

My experience:

Linux Mint Cinnamon, 5.15.0-112-generic Kernel
Hardware: ASRock H570 Phantom Gaming 4, i9-11900K, Nvidia RTX A2000

I have also used Mint/Cinnamon on my previous hardware which I believe used a GeForce 1060 Ti.

I haven't really had much in the way of problems. Oh, at first install on the RTX A2000 display was crappy low resolution (but functional), but all I had to do was open the Driver Manager and tell it to use the Nvidia drivers instead of the open source xorg driver. I did have an issue years later where I had to switch between (if I remember correctly) the 525.x and 535.x driver metapackage (one mouse click in the driver manager) because an update to the package made it act weird, but after clicking on the different package, all good.

I am currently looking into switching away from Mint in favor of MX Linux because of issues with Flatpack being kind of dumb with how large its update downloads are (I have Comcast service, and not unlimited), but the overall experience with Mint has been great and I love the desktop environment.

Mint would still be what I would recommend to anyone making the initial transition away from Windows.

As to Windows messing with dual boot? Honestly I don't know for sure. I have a dual-boot setup on my laptop that I use for on-site IT and haven't had problems there, but that's barely one data point as I almost never use it.

I have a Ryzen board with integrated graphics that I use as my main card on Linux, plus a discrete GeForce RTX 3060 Ti that I use in Windows when I dual-boot for games.

Running steam under Linux using nvidia's prime-run utility actually works really well for every game I've thrown at it. The only reason I still dual-boot is because I'm a couch/controller gamer so I do all my gaming remotely over Steam Link, and that doesn't work for sh** on Linux for me.

I do still use the geforce for non-gaming purposes under Linux (mostly running local LLM AI chatbots and APIs using docker and the nvidia container toolkit, which also all works quite nicely).

In my experience (1070, running Linux from within Proxmox) it has been awful. Can't compare to AMD but can compare to Windows 11 with the exact same hardware + Proxmox setup. Was using it as a media PC hooked up to a TV.

The Linux attempt had severe performance issues trying to decode 4k videos that simply weren't a problem when we tried on windows, and Steam streaming stuttered horribly.

It could be the Proxmox setup causing problems, but I'd have expected Linux to work better virtualised than Windows rather than the other way around.

I’ll sidestep the dual boot question and mention that I recently bought a cheap 8GB USB thumb drive and that’s enough capacity to install a portable Linux Mint Cinnamon with some spare room for future updates. As long as your motherboard supports booting from USB drive (and I’m hard pressed finding any that don’t support that even in the last decade or so)

I went for portable because it’s a basically risk-free option to try it out, and only costs a few dollars. I’m planning on trying it out for a few months to a year, and see if there are any dealbreakers that I haven’t spotted yet or if it’s gonna be my next full time OS at home.

If you have access to cheap USB drives like I do, I’d say go for it!

I have a GT 710 for my linux box and driver installation was relatively painless on my end - but there are essentially two drivers that you choose here. The first one is the 'noveau' ones which are open source third-party ones and the second ones are the official drivers Nvidia has on their website. You can use either one, but I think the takeaway is that they may or may not be for gaming, it depends on what you use your machine for. I don't use my linux box for gaming (mostly schoolwork and programming), sometimes it is weird getting certain settings to work (I tried running quake once and it would display on both my monitors with the crosshair set at the edge of both), and other times it is relatively painless.