[teach]

That's just false. Graphics drivers on Linux are easy to update and offer nearly identical performance in many games.

[tomc1985]

Yeah, just stop your X server and run this opaque binary, answer these questions about kernel modules, restart X, and hope your display config isn't completely messed up... super easy!

//slightly salty

[chupasaurus]

Debian does a good job of repackaging nvidia blob to itself's non-free repo to achieve painless install process.

[tomc1985]

Cool, this is good to know! Should be easy to get it hooked up in Mint.

[chupasaurus]

Note: helper packages (i.e. installer cleanup and kernel mod builder) are in both contrib and main repos, so I highly recommend setting up APT-preferences.

[ahartmetz]

Unless you buy Intel or AMD.

[tomc1985]

Up until very recently I was on Catalyst drivers on Mint 18 and it was just as bad. Thank God the open source drivers work decent now.

And Intel? HA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

One word: gma500 ... welcome to hell!

[ahartmetz]

Yes, I'm talking about the state of software now and hardware up to about five years old. gma500 is from about 2008, apparently.

[izacus]

Except that Intel still doesn't make a graphics chip worth anything when it comes to running 3D games like Fortnight. And AMD opensource drivers are far from having nVidia-like feature and capabilitiy parity with their Windwos counterparts. Sadly.

[ahartmetz]

What is missing from AMD's drivers? They are great now IME, I'm using them to play games. (Note I have older GCN hardware - there seem to be more bugs with more recent hardware where they are still making bigger changes)

[tomc1985]

For a while my employer was buying motherboards with a graphics chip that requires gma500 drivers. Forget which but it was an Atom platform of somewhat recent vintage. gma500 ain't dead yet, sadly

[nl]

I do machine learning for a living.

I don't dare update my display drivers unless I have 3 days without a deliverable because of the disaster it usually is.

Usually (yes, more than 50% of the times) it will break my displays (fail to detect both monitors, switch to some weird resolution etc), and always it will break CUDA/CUDNN so I have hours of work making that work again.

I have a completely standard setup: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, NVidia GPU, Intel CPU.

(I've been using Linux since Slackware 0.9, so yes I do know how to configure things. I'm sick of it not getting better since then).

[maccard]

If it makes you feel any better I don’t update my windows display drivers unless ive 3 days free either, for exactly the same reason...

[ManlyBread]

I don't update my drivers at all unless I run into something that refuses to work, don't fix it if it ain't broke

[maccard]

I work in games, so I have to keep relatively up to date.. I’m usually one - two versions behind...

[notafxn]

I suggest you switch to btrfs and use volume snapshots. That way you can take a snapshot just before you do a major upgrade (like a driver update) and if things don't work out you can instantly restore your system so you can keep working.

[TylerE]

Yeah, right.

Historically, drivers were often not available at all, at least not ones that actually exposed the real power of the hardware - and performance is usually lower.

See this set of recent benchmarks for instance, which show Linux performance lagging behind W10 by 15-25%.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-w...

[ahartmetz]

These days, the performance diff is mostly from relatively low effort ports. I'm not really complaining about them - they have to earn money. But in most cases it's not primarily a drivers problem anymore.