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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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People are mad at MS for being MS. MS isn't great, Windows is flawed, and there should be better alternatives. People would be quick to move to Linux if it worked for them. Most desktops now are for gaming. Most gamers have Nvidia. Linux famously has issues with Nvidia because 90% of the distros out there decided to jump on to Wayland before it was even half done. If that's the state of Linux where my 8-year-old Windows 10 machine still gets updates regularly and runs fine. Windows 10 will actively prevent you from trying to upgrade and bricking your system whereas Linux is absolutely like "Go ahead, hope you read all the patch notes for the 1000s different updates you are about to get!" Most people will go with Windows because Linux doesn't work for them.
Overall Linux has the power to be good, it just doesn't have the community will power to do so.
Both Intel and AMD GPUs work fine on Linux. Both work fine with Wayland.
Wayland has been around for over a decade and has been in a usable state for the last 3 or so years.
Attributing the fact that Nvidia stuff still barely works to the fact that some distros have made Wayland the default is just stupid wrong.
Besides, Nvidia experience isn't/wasn't the smoothest even on Xorg. Linux desktop is simply not a priority for Nvidia.
k, so for the least used hardware, linux works fine. Good to know.
Eh, no, KDE last year just barely started working with Wayland.
The popular distros are what counts. Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora. Just because you have some minor 0.00001% usage distro that still defaults to X11 doesn't really matter.
Worked well enough for me to run into the dozen of other issues that Linux has. While I am sure you will just blow it off as not the true fault of Linux, the result is the same. I like most people want a usable environment. Linux doesn't provide that out of the box. You can argue excuses for it all day but the end of it is, it's not going to be a useful OS until it works out of the box with things like wacom tablets (which are broken with nvidia drivers), xbox controllers (which are just broken unless you do research and install the correct driver), and tons of incompatible software (which I am sure you can blame the developers for.) The end result is the same though, you don't have a working environment.
Yeah, basically. Which raises a question: how companies with much smaller market share can justify providing support, but Nvidia, a company that dominates the GPU market, can't?
Debian supports several DEs with only Gnome defaulting to Wayland. Everything else uses X11 by default.
Some other popular distros that ship with Gnome or KDE still default to X11 too. Pop!_OS, for example. Zorin. SteamOS too, technically. EndeavorOS and Manjaro are similar to Debian, since they support several DEs.
Either way, none of those are Wayland exclusive and changing to X11 takes exactly 2 clicks on the login screen. Which isn't necessary for anyone using AMD or Intel, and wouldn't be necessary for Nvidia users, if Nvidia actually bothered to support their hardware properly. But I digress.
Oh, it's no way perfect. Never claimed it is.
This both depends on the disto you use and on what you consider a "usable environment".
If you extensively use Office 365, OneDrive, need ActiveDirectory, have portable storage encrypted with BitLocker, etc. then, sure, you won't have a good experience with any distro out there. Or even if you don't, but you grab a geek oriented distro (e.g. Arch or Gentoo) or a barebones one (e.g. Debian) you, again, won't have the best experience.
A lot of people, however, don't really do a whole lot on their devices. The most widely used OS in the world, at this point in time, is Android, of all things.
If all you need to do is use the web and, maybe, edit some documents or pictures now and then, Linux is perfectly capable of that.
Real life example: I've switched my parents onto Linux. They're very much not computer savvy and Gnome with it's minimalistic mobile device-like UI and very visual app-store-like program manager is significantly easier for them to grasp. The number of issues they ask me to deal with has dropped by... A lot. Actually, every single issue this year was the printer failing to connect to the Wifi, so, I don't suppose that counts as a technical issue with the computer, does it?
I use Gnome (Wayland) with an AMD GPU. My tablet is plug and play... Unlike on Windows. Go figure.
I feel like it's the opposite as Nvidia provides a lot of Linux support by providing an open source kernel module (https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules) while AMD gets proprietary blobs into the Linux kernel ( https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/configure-2d-and-3d-graphics-acceleration). How come Linux is supporting AMD more than Nvidia currently?
You're linking a post... From 2010. AMD replaced radeon with their open source drivers (AMDgpu) in 2015. That's what pretty much any AMD GPU that came out in the last 10 years uses now.
Furthermore, the AMDgpu drivers are in-tree drivers, and AMD actively collaborate with the kernel maintainers and developers of other graphics related projects.
As for Nvidia: their kernel modules are better than nothing, but they don't contain a whole lot in terms of actual implementation. If before we had a solid black box, now, with those modules, we know that this black box has around 900 holes and what comes in and out of those.
Furthermore, if you look at the page you've linked, you'll see that "the GitHub repository will function mostly as a snapshot of each driver release". While the possibility of contributing is mentioned... Well, it's Nvidia. It took them several years to finally give up trying to force EGLStreams and implement GBM, which was already adopted as the de-facto standard by literally everybody else.
The modules are not useless. Nvidia tend to not publish any documentation whatsoever, so it's probably better than nothing and probably of some use for the nouveau driver developers... But it's not like Nvidea came out and offered to work on nouveau to make up to par and comparable to their proprietary drivers.
Nvidia on wayland really isn't that bad nowadays. Hell I would say that it's pretty good even
With a 1080 it hard locks on start up. With a 3080, same results, with my 1660, same results. Tested with Fedora 38.
maybe try Nobara or PopOS that provide support for nvidia ootb
I'll check again but I believe as I was testing out Linux distros to put on my kid's laptop just 2 weeks ago, I tested PopOS and it somehow failed. I think it failed to boot entirely because some service not launching. I'd need to double-check that though. Overall I had about 6 distros to go through and moved on. I've stayed away from Nobara because it doesn't seem like a well-trodden path.
I've looked at jumping back into FreeBSD or perhaps going to Gentoo but frankly, that's more if I was going to turn my whole computer into a hobby project and I have other hobbies I want to use my computer for.