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Comment by mindfulhack | Hacker News Reader

Everyone in the Linux space, from what I regularly read and hear, says that NVIDIA GPUs are notorious and a bad idea for using Linux. They're saying go with AMD. (As well as Ryzen instead of Intel for CPUs, where possible.) The only open-source nouveau drivers are absolutely terrible, I can attest to that fact myself. There's several benefits to not relying on NVIDIA's proprietary and non-in-built drivers for a decent experience. You'll know this already, depending on how deeply and regularly you use Linux.

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I will anecdotally agree; I've been a Linux laptop user for... well, 2 decades maybe? and explicitly choose Dell Mobile Precision and/or IBM/Lenovo T-series laptops with ATI/AMD, dealing with NVIDIA graphics is just a pain in the ass once we passed the GeForce era (ish).

I'd rather just have/use Intel GPU over them as well, I am not a laptop gamer to need anything NVIDIA offers in exchange for the pain in maintenance using out of tree modules to me.

I will anecdotally disagree.

Depending on which distro you use NVIDIA grapics can be quite painless. Using Pop!_OS, I just had to download the correct iso from their downloads page.

I believe most other distros have NVIDIA's drivers in their non FL/OSS repos as well.

Optimus graphics will even work with the most current drivers.

This is also the distro my employees are using.

I'll agree here as well. While I'd love to get more AMD centric options without Nvidia - they're not as bad these days as it was years ago. In fact I use an Intel NUC (Skull Canyon) as my daily desktop driver. The kicker is I wanted to do some OpenCV with Nvidia and run the NUC with an eGPU on Linux. I've been doing it for years and it works surprisingly well. It's gotten even better with 'egpu-switcher' [0].

[0] https://github.com/hertg/egpu-switcher

I’m using Pop!Os (preinstalled) with a sys76 laptop. Works great (can even game) battery life is terrible (though it looks fantastic and can drive a 32 inch high dpi external)

I can switch to built in Intel video for better battery but it requires a reboot. I see this as a stopgap. My home machine has an amd video.

It's definitely sub-optimal needing to reboot.

I only need the NVIDIA graphics every so often on my laptop though, so it's fine for me.

On desktop I've had no issues.

I've used nvidia GPUs on Ubuntu with the proprietary drivers.

In my experience they're largely OK. There are some rough edges - you'll struggle to get Steam and CUDA working at the same time, for example - but no showstopping problems.

I certainly don't have a debilitating kernel panic every week :)

I'm in the Linux space. My GTX 1060 works just fine.

What's your experience been with amdgpu?

At my end, that's what I have to start testing on my 2019 MBP as I plan a transition to bare metal Linux fully on it, using the tools at https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux. (Will take several months.) I'll be sure to document it in that community and share tips when extensive testing is done.

It's only MBP NVIDIA GPU in Linux (older model) that I have extensive experience on so far, and it's been terrible with nouveau.

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