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by krackpot 1208 days ago
Is this true? I'm in the market for an AMD card just to switch over to linux. I'm on an old 1080.

Most discussions centered around the various linux communities seem to parrot that AMD is the way to go now because of open source drivers etc. I always wonder how much of it is an echo chamber.
3 comments
freedomben 1208 days ago
I run Linux on everything, and have a system with nvidia card and one with AMD, so speaking from real experience rather than echo chamber regurgitation (which is definitely a problem in this space so good to be aware of it). I will go AMD every time for gaming and general dual/triple screen monitors. I would only go Nvidia if I needed CUDA (such as for machine learning).

If you need OpenCL or if you go Nvidia and need the proprietary driver, it will make distros like Fedora (my favorite), Arch, etc a lot more difficult as they stay very current on kernels (which is great for hardware compatibility). Nvidia is better than AMD in this regard if you need the AMD pro then you just won't be able to run Fedora. If you don't mind Ubuntu, then you'll be ok. It's well supported for Nvidia drivers and AMD Pro.

I have been amazed at how well everything "just works" with AMD on Fedora, and for that reason AMD is my default.

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mardifoufs 1208 days ago
It depends. If you are willing to download proprietary drivers from nvidia, it literally just works. Though I'd probably suggest not getting on a rolling release distro, or any distro that is focused on mostly sticking with libre/foss solutions. Ubuntu works great with non free drivers, out of the box, so just use that. Kernel updates might be tricky on some distros, so sticking with more stable releases is preferable in my experience

(I have used AMD and NVIDIA cards, including a 4 GTX1070 cluster a few years back with mostly little issues on both. Also used GCN andRDNA1, and now I use nvidia on ubuntu for work and it just works.)

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lmm 1208 days ago
If you want to run Linux and have your system work as nicely as possible, go with NVidia; they write better drivers than AMD and always have done.

(The counterargument is: if you're going to use a proprietary driver why are you switching to Linux at all?)

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brokenmachine 1208 days ago
I don't agree with this. I've been using an Ubuntu system for ages with Nvidia and it regularly needs a reinstall of the drivers when it randomly decides to come up in some silly low resolution, like 320x240 or something.

My next linux GPU is AMD.

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lmm 1208 days ago
With the first-party NVidia drivers? I've never had that happen or even heard of it happening before now. Admittedly I don't use Ubuntu much, and they sound like the kind of distro that would silently auto-update your kernel or something, which would produce that kind of failure mode? (Which is at least a clean immediate failure on reboot that you can fix immediately, rather than something that crashes in the middle of your session destroying your work - as bad as it is, that still sounds a lot better than my AMD card experience).

Whereas I've used linux on several systems with AMD/ATi cards and they've always been flaky.

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brokenmachine 1208 days ago
Yes, the .run drivers from Nvidia.

It only happens on a reboot, not while I'm using it, and only maybe once a month, but it's still annoying because I have to ssh in to reinstall the drivers every time.

And here I was all hyped that AMD would be my savior. I hope you're wrong!!

I'll find out for myself the next time I upgrade and I switch the current AMD card that I'm using on my Windows PC into the ubuntu system.

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lmm 1208 days ago
> Yes, the .run drivers from Nvidia.

If you're manually installing them outside of Ubuntu package management then you need to reinstall them every time you upgrade your kernel. (This is a design decision by Linux to make life harder for closed source drivers, there's nothing Nvidia can do about it)

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oynqr 1208 days ago
Using the driver from their site is the number one way to fuck up your system. There has got to be an nvidia package on Ubuntu.
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brokenmachine 1207 days ago
In my experience the ubuntu nvidia packages were hopeless, I forget exactly what it was but I think even basic stuff like hardware video decoding was not working.

Anyway just basic stuff wasn't working and IIRC the GPU fans would stay at 100% all the time. Just terribly broken.

I'm overall happy with the .run drivers from the site except when they come up at the wrong resolution and need reinstalling as I described.

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