I think it's more of a
Open drivers vs proprietary drivers
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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That's the thing with AMD drivers, they're the damn near perfect software. Doing lots of stuff yet you'd never know it's there. It stays nicely out of the user's way, you don't even have to think about installing them and shit just works
Then there are the Nvidia drivers
They are not perfect, but their developers β 1 or 2 actually allocated to work on in-kernel drivers, such as Mario Limonciello β almost are.
I used em dashes to avoid a comma party, I promise I am not a LLM bot
I used em dashes to avoid a comma party, I promise I am not a LLM bot
that's what I would say if I was an LLM bot!!
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15 years ago this was true lol
3 years ago this was true. Not sure if nvidia works properly with wayland even now, though at least the trend is different now
It has no issues, NVIDIA just works these days (if you use a distro where you can choose to use proprietary drivers for it during installation)
I mean yeah, but thatβs a little like saying βcomputers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.β Itβs a pretty large limitation to place on the userβs choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.
It used to be that there was no option at all, on any distro. You'd have the broken proprietary drivers, or the open source reverse engineered one with half the performance and unreliability in specialty features.
Since then Nvidia has shifted focus to get their drivers working properly, and there were also changes making them more open source, tho I'm not sure that'd mean the "proprietary driver" will go full foss at some point.
If op is to be believed, the proprietsry driver is already a lot more stable, so it's now a software licensing issue not an unfixable technical issue.
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Well, no, not at all. Nvida works on wayland on any distro, but it just works on some distros.
It just works means no user config required.
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You might not remember ATI atrocity.
Eh. I had issues with Nvidia drivers like 5 years ago. Still, a lot more stable today
The fps gap in games is still quite high with nvidia compared to windows, amd is almost on par now
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When you want to do GPU processing for AI, crypto, video editing, etc, though, this gets reversed.
Getting Cuda working on Linux with an nvidia card is relatively painless. Just a few well-documented commands, worked on the first try.
I could never get AMD's equivalent to work on Linux, though, and it led me down a horrible rabbit-hole of trying a dozen different driver versions from a dozen different places, all with their own unique and quirky ways of installing... And it still never did work.
ROCM is pretty simple. It's just no where near as robust and supported as Cuda.
Thats just poor distro support, kind of like CUDA in the past.. ROCM should "just work" if it's shipped right. But it's not really a priority with maintainers.
Now, if you're trying to run CUDA stuff with ROCM, that's a whole different story. The bast majority of GPU software has extremely poor ROCM support compared to CUDA, and some of this is definitely from AMD footgunning.
For me cuda was painful. I did the well documented commands, rebooted and had no output on my laptop screen anymore. Probably a complication due to Optimus, but still...
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For me it was deadsimple once i tried setting it up with nix, granted you need to learn a little about nix so maybe that cancels it out a bit lol.
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i wish i could go to an amd card but i just upgraded my video card (geforce rtx 4060 ti) like 3 months before i decided to move to linux :(
Jo, no problem! Just use the proprietary drivers and vulcan, cuda etc. Just works
Especially with a recent card, like a 4060. Problematic are only the cards which are considered legacy by nvidia (I think older than the GTX 900 series), because they do not update their drivers for newer kernels. In these cases resorting to nouveau (in-kernel driver for nvidia cards) is your best bet, but you will not use the cardβs full potential.
Edit: One can of course use proprietary drivers with legacy cards if you use a distro in a legacy kernel. But having old kernel then comes with less compatibility to other devices, as backports generally take their time.
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I feel ya. I built pure AMD explicitly for linux gaming early last year... and then proceeded to not install linux for like 6 months π had a 2080 ti for years before that
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Never had an issue with my Nvidia card. OBS can use the hardware encoder out of the box. Just a few weeks ago upgraded to a AMD card and had to set some "advanced" settings in OBS to do the same. Really happy overall, but after seeing this meme for years I expected rainbows and sunshine but was unpleasantly surprised in that regard.
my nvidia card caused sleeping and hibernation to randomly and regularly fail, and it made me very vary of system updates breaking random things.
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I'm running wayland with nvidia-open and nvidia-utils packages, and have never encountered any driver issues in both graphics and compute.
The only time I've ever really had issues with Nvidia drivers is when installing the meta package for CUDA (because it tends to include a previous version of the driver, which causes install/uninstall havok), or with laptops and hybrid graphics.
But the laptop issue is almost completely gone with newer distros like Bazzite.
because it tends to include a previous version of the driver, which causes install/uninstall havok
To be fair, this is a packaging/distro problem, as CUDA should always work (and be kept in sync with) the newest graphics driver.
ROCM and OpenVINO (AMD and Intel) are even more of a pain, actually.
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AMD should make drivers for nVidia hardware. π€·ββοΈ
They'd probably work better than Nvidia's
Intel be like that skeleton at the bottom underwater
In LMDE4, 5 and 6, I pretty much had to install the OEM NVIDIA driver because the open source Nouveau driver didn't quite cut it, but for AMD, the stock driver that comes with LMDE7 has worked fine for my purposes so far.
I may change my tune if I try to run a more modern game*, but that will likely put me back in Frankendebian territory which caused me problems under LMDE6. (As you might surmise, I upgraded to new hardware and tried to do things as I'd always done them when LMDE6 was current.)
* Minecraft notwithstanding, because it both is and isn't modern. That can get above 1000 FPS if I don't limit it.
On one hand, setting up complicated stuff is a challenge and also fun.
On the other hand, I don't wanna pay a company doing propreitery stuff.
On the other feet, prices are increasing due to chatbot girlfriend arms race between richest dudes on earth; are GPUs really even worth it anymore?
nvidia drivers are all dependant on who is implementing them
I only ever have problems if the kernel is updated without the drivers, because I somehow updated before the video driver was included
this is my experience for over 10 years now on Arch
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this has not been my experience with AMD driversβ¦
So which one is better?
The one you own is better cause no one can afford to choose anymore.
Any 1080ti homies here?
Best I can do is TI-86.
The graphics card in my laptop lets me play Megabonk and Dead Cells and Shotgun King. Do I need anything more than that?
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Well, can't say for everybody, but i have no trouble running nvidia gpu on Hyprland with nvidia-open drivers. Haven't spotted any troubles with Plasma or MangoWC either, even though i haven't used them for as long.
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A decade ago it used to be opposite. How far Nvidia has fallen.
Considering their stock price has grown by 27,557% in those 10 years, I don't think too many people at the company are concerned with their "falling"
https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/NVDA/performance/total-return
It sucks that they abandoned us, and it's awful that they're a huge part of the AI bubble,. But, this is like an artist who used to play on Tuesday evenings at your local live music venues "selling out" and now playing stadiums.
I run a legacy NVIDIA graphics in my ten year old laptop. GeForce 750M. The proprietary drivers are faster and have real video acceleration but havenβt been updated in forever and donβt support Wayland.
Nouveau works okay. I havenβt gotten video acceleration to work yet, even with installed firmware. Nouveau-vulkan is a bit buggy.
I'm super annoyed at Fedora workstation at this moment. My 240hz Samsung monitor can't use HDMI to get to 240hz, regardless of the quality of the cable. I have dual monitors and one is already using the type c so one of my monitors have to be 120hz.
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PopOS has been running great for months on my 3070, but I'm about to swap it for a 5060TI and I'm a bit worried.
Nothing to worry about π drivers that work great with 3070 will work great with a 5060