[tatref]

I supported AMD several years because of this... Then I got tired of the low quality of both the open source, and the closed driver. Crashes, glitches in movies, flickering...

Some time ago, I bought an Nvidia. It works like charm with the closed driver on Linux and windows. I do mainly games on Linux/windows, some gpgpu (machine learning with tensor flow), and the usual stuff. I couldn't be happier... Except if it was open source ;-)

[AsyncAwait]

I purchased an AMD laptop precisely because I got tired of having to deal with NVidia, ether their glitchy proprietary driver breaking GNOME every so often, or Optimus being a pain via Bumblebee.

Since switching to the AMD laptop, my experience has been smooth. My only worry is the upgrade path, there aren't that many high-performance AMD laptops out there and my next purchase is definitely AMD.

[beezischillin]

If the new 3rd generation Ryzen stuff ends up being as good as it looks, then I'd say we're in for a good year as far as mobile AMD hardware's concerned. There's a good chance that you have nothing to worry about as far as upgrade paths are considered.

[AsyncAwait]

I hope so, but my current laptop has a desktop-class Ryzen 7 1700 in it and their mobile offerings usually come with half as many cores, but I guess we'll see what Ryzen 3 has to offer.

[sitkack]

Which laptop is this?

[AsyncAwait]

The ASUS ROG GL702ZC

[Thaxll]

Well Nvidia is better with closed source drivers than AMD with open source, having open source driver means nothing in term of driver quality, what matters is how many people are working on it and for Nvidia there are much much more people working on it because Nvidia is very popular outside of gaming on Linux.

[briffle]

I had the opposite experience. I had an older nvidia card. The binary driver would work great, then an update to the nvidia driver would come out, and the next reboot, I got to have lots of fun trying to get get it repaired without a gui. Half the time, just uninstalling/re-installing the older version would fix it.

[dpwm]

IIRC Nvidia have dropped support for entire chipsets during seemingly minor updates to their Linux driver. This happened to me with an older card.

I think I ended up bisecting the changelogs to find that they had dropped support two versions back.

[cr0sh]

For a long time I was on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the NVidia driver, and every time to update it would be a pain; inevitably, when I rebooted, I'd be at a console, having to fix the damn thing so the updated driver would work.

After a couple of times of this, what I saw that was happening (and I am not saying this was it in your case) was my X config file was being replaced/updated and really just breaking everything. So I got in the habit of always making a backup of that file. Usually, when dropped at the console, I could just backup the config file there, then copy my old file over, and everything would work perfectly on restart.

Except this last time (a few months ago) - but it was inevitable it would happen, and it was entirely my fault.

I had a need a couple of years back to be able to use the latest C++ 11 version of gcc - but 14.04 LTS didn't have it available, and there wasn't any backports. So I decided to "wing it" from scratch, compiling a new version.

Then I found myself in dependency hell - which I also got past through a variety of updates from for my Ubuntu, or via download and install, etc. It was a complete mess, but in the end I got it working...

...until I tried to update - the entire update system was fairly broken, so no moving forward from 14.04 LTS.

But I thought I could do NVidia's latest proprietary driver - and it needed the compiler and other parts (for what reason I don't know) and it died a horrible death, leaving me with no good options to for the driver. I had to fall back to the open source neuveau driver (yuck) just to get my desktop back. But things were pretty well hosed.

Fortunately my OS was on a seperate partition and drive, so I bit the bullet and did a reinstall and upgrade (to Budgie Desktop 18.04 LTS), and vowed to never do any hand compile and install stuff again (next time if I need such a thing, it's going to be in a VM or containerized).

[foxylad]

I've often wondered about putting the whole of /etc into a git repository, so any changes (either by software updates, or by myself) were visible and reversible. Does anyone do this, and if not why not?

[gshrikant]

You might be interested in etckeeper [1].

[1] https://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/

[tyfon]

I have a GTX 670 in my main computer and I'm going threadripper/ati card next for sure.

I had issues with the proprietary nvidia drivers just today and it took me about 1 hour to fix (arch linux).

My attitude was the same as you but it has shifted in the last year or so. Maybe just because I want that sick CPU :)

[IdiocyInAction]

The NVidia driver is a crapshoot though. I have massive problems with it on my desktop and none at all on my laptop. I have had more consistently good experiences with AMD.

[mackal]

My experience with AMD open drivers has been great. I had an HD 6850 before, new system with an RX 580, both have worked great. Had a few issues with the 6850 earlier on, but nothing too bad like you've described.

[shmerl]

Nvidia Optimus is a horror story on laptops if you are using Linux.

[heroprotagonist]

I thought it was interesting how they began forcing Windows users through a login page to associate identity, and a continuous background telemetry service, but not Linux users. The telemetry service needs to be running just to check for updates to the gaming card drivers.

At least, I personally didn't have that experience on Linux with proprietary driver when the Windows gaming rig did. They likely determined it wasn't worth the effort or Linux users would be more likely to lash back at the intrusion. Or it could have been a later target but still on their plan..

Have they changed this and forced their telemetry collection onto the Linux desktop yet?

I doubt they'd prereq it to install drivers for their ML or workstation cards. I'm a little more worried about their gaming/desktop cards.

[llukas]

You need to login for GeForce Experience not for driver. GFE is optional.

[heroprotagonist]

Except it's not accessible to 90% of users because it's only delivered as a single package that installs both of them in combination. If you decline their telemetry service, it does not install the driver.

If you want to install just the driver, you have to extract the driver from their executable and manually handle updates, or use a third party package manager like chocolatey.

Most people won't know this is possible. The trade-off to the vast majority is to trade unknown bits of their information for security and stability updates.

Should that really be the default state of things?

[ab5tract]

I have tried several times do exactly that and have yet to succeed.

[tatref]

I'm replying to all the answers here.

It seems that everyone has a different experience on the subject! Just a precision: I had an ATI card (laptop) from 2005 to 2010, then an ATI (desktop) from 2010 to 2017.