You don’t want to, though. They’re horrible. There’s an insane amount of effort that would be required to reverse-engineer drivers since Nvidia is at best negligent. AMD and Intel are much better about OSS.
I’m not fully a penguin, but getting there. Saw the memes, experienced it first hand in one case and was plug and play in another. It’s luck of the draw.
There was one for Windows too, but most people don’t remember the hundreds of hours of learning that they’ve done to become competent users of Windows.
Just jump in, don’t dual boot. Having no option of giving up and booting Windows makes you motivated to learn how to use Linux.
There’s a community of people who will help (while also sometimes being insufferable assholes) and the skills you learn will be more durable. You’re not going to see Linux 11 come along and mandate that you buy a new computer or anything.
NVK is very slowly getting there, from what I’ve read. if I remember correctly, it’s still gives horrible performance (about 50%-ish of the closed source ones, I think?), but it’s still miles better than “you’re really better off using your integrated GPU” that noveau offered for ages.
Fair enough. I wish them well in the effort. It would be nice if Nvidia threw them a bone, though, what with all the AI money and their GPUs being used in so many Linux supercomputers and servers.
That is no longer the case. The Nvidia drivers for Linux are pretty decent, these days. They’re still closed source, so if that’s a deal breaker for you, you’ll need to buy an AMD GPU.
The problem is not that they are bad, is that if someone makes a project that depends on the specific drivers then it will work much worse if the drivers are closed source. Wayland was unusable with nvidia drivers until recently.
You don’t want to, though. They’re horrible. There’s an insane amount of effort that would be required to reverse-engineer drivers since Nvidia is at best negligent. AMD and Intel are much better about OSS.
been plug and play for me using Nvidia + Linux for years now. Just upgraded to a 5070ti, literally was take out old, put in the new.
I’m not fully a penguin, but getting there. Saw the memes, experienced it first hand in one case and was plug and play in another. It’s luck of the draw.
There’s a learning curve, sure.
There was one for Windows too, but most people don’t remember the hundreds of hours of learning that they’ve done to become competent users of Windows.
Just jump in, don’t dual boot. Having no option of giving up and booting Windows makes you motivated to learn how to use Linux.
There’s a community of people who will help (while also sometimes being insufferable assholes) and the skills you learn will be more durable. You’re not going to see Linux 11 come along and mandate that you buy a new computer or anything.
It’s not luck it’s pretty well defined what works
NVK is very slowly getting there, from what I’ve read. if I remember correctly, it’s still gives horrible performance (about 50%-ish of the closed source ones, I think?), but it’s still miles better than “you’re really better off using your integrated GPU” that noveau offered for ages.
Fair enough. I wish them well in the effort. It would be nice if Nvidia threw them a bone, though, what with all the AI money and their GPUs being used in so many Linux supercomputers and servers.
There’s a project working on making CUDA work on all (read: AMD) graphics cards. It’s alpha-level, but the progress makes it look promising.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/a-project-to-bring-cuda-to-non-nvidia-gpus-is-making-major-progress-zluda-update-now-has-two-full-time-developers-working-on-32-bit-physx-support-and-llms-amongst-other-things
e: Tom’s Hardware links are half the size of the article 😂
I know. The best you can do in Linux is not use nvidia.
That is no longer the case. The Nvidia drivers for Linux are pretty decent, these days. They’re still closed source, so if that’s a deal breaker for you, you’ll need to buy an AMD GPU.
The problem is not that they are bad, is that if someone makes a project that depends on the specific drivers then it will work much worse if the drivers are closed source. Wayland was unusable with nvidia drivers until recently.
I’m not sure if the closed-source drivers have social media garbage on them at the moment, but I’m very sure that I don’t trust Nvidia not to add it.
This is quite frankly nonsense