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.
Yup
Nvidia has come a long way the past 10-15 years for Linux, just don't tell AMD fanboys that.
No it hasn't, Nvidia usability in Linux now is the same as it was 10-15 years ago, and that's sort of the problem. What do you think has improved since then? I remember ~18 years ago getting Nvidia to work with the proprietary drivers on my Mint was just a couple of clicks away and I could play oblivion and many other games that ran on Wine (and the very few natives we had) just fine. The majority of the Nvidia issues are self-inflicted, always have been, the problem is that because you have to use the proprietary drivers it's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and inexperienced people tend to do it very often, so my guess is that 10-15 years ago is when you started using Linux, and broke stuff with the Nvidia driver, nowadays you don't break that stuff and you think the driver has changed, when what has changed is you.
In the last 18 monts, they're enabled explicit sync, which was pretty much the turning point in making NVIDIA drivers/GPUs usable. On top of that, they've open sourced the kernel modules.
It's very very different to what it was even 2 years ago.
Iirc, explicit sync was an issue for Wayland because how X11 worked meant that the driver had enough info to implicitly do the sync, and I've been on X11 using NVIDIA with very minor issues before swapping to Wayland.
In any case, I agree that the drivers' compatibility has been improved a lot in the last years, I love explicit sync.
As a 1060 owner I'm gonna tell you this is probably the case only for newer gpus!
3080 with minor issues. Minor being fucking MH: Wilds is coded like a fucking potato. Funnily enough the performance is better than on windows lmao. But there are some shader issues.
Besides that and some minor hiccups like PoE2 crashing on Vulkan (they let you pick between Vulkan or dx12) before they patched it, games generally just work.
I had no issues on my 1050ti nor my 4070.
I did have issues on my amd phantom 2 many moons ago
I gamed on Linux with a 1080 for a few years there and it was alright, I have gone AMD though just so I don't have to bother.
I have been using linux with a 1060 for almost 4 years, and it isn't that bad now, tho you need to make a lot of compromise!
At the beginning I experiencing a lot of graphical glitches! Like screen flipping when using an app that used a lot of gpu power or app going black after doing soo!
To this day on that pc I still experience black bars on the sides of apps and as even stated by doitsujin (dxvk creator):
Source: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/issues/465#issuecomment-744092867
And all of this on xorg to be clear! On the other hand I have an amd laptop with an igpu where I can safely say my experience was almost flawless!
I cannot report anything of the sort out of a GTX-1080. Using Linux Mint, X11 and the proprietary drivers handled by Mint's driver manager, I got reliable service in video editing, CAD and gaming. I will note, my main computer is now a Radeon system running Wayland.