Comment by tostiheld | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tostiheld | Hacker News Reader

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> It looks to me that if you want to have a working computer under Linux, it's worth the extra cost to avoid AMD.

I think this is a rather hasty conclusion. The popular opinion is the opposite. If you want a working computer under Linux, it's worth it to avoid NVIDIA, especially for laptops. Sure, AMD are not perfect contributors to the kernel, but they are contributing more than NVIDIA[0]. NVIDIA has made some moves recently[1], but the AMD GPUs are still better integrated. Notably since the Steam Deck had been released, the situation has been excellent.

Anecdotally, my laptop with an NVIDIA GPU has many issues that have persisted over the years with things like high idle power draw or frequent straight up crashes, or incomplete Wayland support. My 3 devices that have an AMD GPU (1 desktop, 2 laptops) however, have been working flawlessly from day 1.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Contributions-2010s-Ker...

[1] https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

It depends on the use case. AMD is notorious for their "AMD reset bug" when passing a GPU through to a VM using VFIO. Restart the guest and most cards will lock up because AMD doesn't handle PCI resets properly. You then need to reboot the host to fix it (!). This has been a problem since Polaris if not before and AMD hasn't fixed it, despite knowing full well that the problem exists. At least in this regard, NVIDIA (and Intel as far as I know) work fine.

The community has been able to come up with a workaround for some older cards but the problem persists even in their current cards.

https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset

Agreed.

I have first-hand experience across five distinct AMD 7840U and AMD 8840U devices that near-perfect, out-of-the-box Linux-support (with stock kernels and no dodgy kernel flags!) is possible. This includes support for S0ix suspend.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43083669

I don't doubt it when people recount their bad experiences with AMD devices; however, my experience should serve as an existence proof that it's not a universal experience.

In the case of each device mentioned in the comment above, I followed a standard installation procedure from an Arch installer USB. I use only stock kernels: linux, linux-lts, and linux-zen. For almost all of the devices, the only kernel flags I pass are for enabling hibernate or handling FDE. (In one or two cases, the devices have portrait displays that have been installed for use in landscape-orientation. These need an `fbcon=rotate:…` kernel flag.)

In all but one case (the OneXPlayer X1 Ryzen) everything (except fingerprint readers) works flawlessly. In the case of the OneXPlayer X1 Ryzen, there is an intermittent issue with hang on suspend, but that may have gone away with a recent kernel update. If not, I'll probably come back to this blog post and see what I can do…

Are you using proprietary Nvidia drivers? They work flawlessly for me, even better than the AMD open source "mainline" kernel drivers.

In my case, the choice wasn't between AMD and Nvidia but between the iGPUs included in the CPUs, i.e. AMD or Intel.

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