There are many reasons to dislike Nvidia on Linux. Here is a little thing that bugs me all the time, the updates. Normally the system updates would be quick and fast, but with the proprietary drivers of Nvidia involved, it gets quiet slow process. And I am not even talking about any other problem I encounter, just about the updates.
As an Archlinux based system user (EndeavourOS to be precise), I get new Kernel updates all the time. That means every time a new Kernel version is installed, the Nvidia driver DKMS has to be installed too. And that is basically the slowest part. But that’s not too bad, even though it’s doing this twice for each Kernel I have once.
What’s more infuriating is, if you also happen to use Flatpaks for a very few applications. I really don’t have many Flatpaks at all. Yet, the Nvidia drivers are installed in 7 versions or what?! And they are full downloads, each 340 MB or more. This takes ages and is the only part that takes long to update Flatpak system. I always do flatpak remove --unused to make sure nothing useless is present. /RANT (EDIT: Just typos corrected.)
A few reasons. It’s received wisdom that AMD are the good guys because in the Intel / AMD slog they are the underdogs fighting the good fight and bringing good affordable products to all vs intel who has historically behaved in a sleazy underhanded and anti-competitive fashion and when they bought ATi they moved ATi from a maker of shitty proprietary poorly supported pieces of shit to an open source friendly maker of acceptable GPUS.
Since Nvidia is the bad guy in that fight it would be handy if Nvidia was also badly supported buggy, inferior. The fact that Nvidia is actually more stable, well supported, and generally better is somewhat a fly in the ointment.
It’s especially humorous when its coming from users of a permanent beta distro like arch where the kernel update process is that the new kernel is pushed extremely quickly after release. Expert arch users realize that means they are their own QA as far as out of tree modules. Actually stable distros express what is known to work as dependencies such that you trivially get something that is known to work when you press go. They also don’t run the kernel release that was cut this morning.
Meanwhile users of arch derived distros, who may or may not claim to be running arch while believing their distro is ubuntu with faster updates yell that nvidia is broken when 6.3 doesn’t work the day it was cut with nvidia using a driver that doesn’t claim to support 6.3. The fact that this dependency is known but not encoded into arch packages isn’t an Nvidia problem.
Even Manjaro a distro run by folks who once told their users to set their clocks back because they forgot to renew their SSL Cert figured out they can avoid almost as much trouble as smart people can avoid by actually reading by just being lazy and not pulling changes instantly.
I am actually running Arch and have had very little issues with Nvidia, but plenty with my AMD GPUs.
I love this comment! Yeah it’s true, I’m the arch linux user you’re describing! So is there a good middle ground according to you? Where we can have faster updates, high application support and high customization without the downsides of arch that you describe?