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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

I don't expect them to ever work properly. Basically, if you care about good Wayland user experience and proper desktop integration, you should be using AMD or Intel GPU already.

Waiting for Nvidia to fix this mess is pointless. Nvidia will be DOA as long as they refuse to upstream their driver or to support Nouveau to begin with. And they didn't show any interest for years.

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For Nvidia this is not a mess; they support X for their supported use-cases and that's just it, and X works pretty much perfectly for me now, even PRIME is essentially issue-less. I give them a lot of credit for making Nvidia GPUs in laptops on Linux as viable as on Windows.

PRIME is working for you? How? I couldn't get it working at all. Are there any guides for this?

This chapter of the NV driver manual details how: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/460.56/READ...

On Turing and later, you can also enable this: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/460.56/READ... to totally turn off the dGPU when not in use.

It is a complete mess due to their inability to properly support kernel interfaces. Their driver is a blob and it's the source of all their problems with integration. Nothing stopped them from upstreaming it a long time ago but they prefer keeping the mess to doing things right.

PRIME doesn't work because they only implemented it half way. After decades of not implementing anything that is. I call such level of support complete garbage.

There's not a lot of options in the workstation space other than NV drivers on X11. As long as nouveau continues sending illegal instructions to cards and crashing Quadros on startup, it's a non-starter. Xeons don't include a GPU, so you'll need to add an RX 2100 to the system instead of another A100 or RTX Titan. It can be done, but I don't see RX 2100s having a place in our machines anytime soon.

The best option if you need modern Linux desktop is to ditch Nvidia and to switch to AMD.

For compute as well? Maybe once ROCm is actually supported by their newest cards, but this two-year lag on compute support does not inspire confidence. Neither Navi nor Big Navi are supported -- the last card with ROCm support is Vega.

Will a little stupid, you could add an AMD card to your workstation and use that to drive your display. Then use the Nvidia card for compute only. That would also free up some memory and compute resources on the Nvidia card.

You can even get an old model of the AMD card. It only need to run the desktop stuff, so you can buy a five year old used card.

Support is better in latest cards, but they are still lagging behind for scenarios like Blender and etc.

For compute, you don't need the desktop, so the Wayland vs X11 debate is moot.

I dunno... Blender, video editing, etc. usually require a desktop.

That's not what it is mostly used for, i.e. ML-like workloads.

OpenCL (that's what Blender, DaVinci Resolve, etc use for their acceleration) is a layer above ROCm, and it runs. Not very nicely, but it does and is supposed to receive more attention in future.

Also, you can still use one gpu for desktop and other for compute.

Nvidia have been extremely bad to work with in the past (hasn't Linus said something about this?), but their recent efforts are giving me some hope. They seem somewhat interested in supporting the Linux desktop nowadays.

I don't think they are interested a lot more. Same glacial pace of support. I don't expect it to improve until their driver will be in the upstream kernel.

There was some brief announcement about some kind of open sourcing news a while ago which could be it, but nothing came out of that.

So you can still apply the take of Nouveau developers themselves - simply use AMD.

Easier said than done, given it's nearly impossible to buy AMD GPUs at the moment (and has been for a while now)

That's a good point, but applies equally to Nvidia which is also impossible to buy. I'm myself waiting to get a new AMD GPU.

Indeed, I was planning on updating my graphics card this year. Looks now like it'll happen maybe in 2022.

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