I’m on KDE Plasma with Nvidia and Wayland with the proprietary 530 drivers but really the experience (due to Nvidia’s own fault) doesn’t feel polished at all although it’s very smooth, but the fact of having to be constantly switching between Xorg and Wayland because one or another program doesn’t behave the way it should in Wayland (frameskipping, blank screen, tearing) and I was thinking if using the open source drivers could fix something or make it worse.
I remember testing the open source drivers some time ago and running the Terraria compilation for Linux was not working well at all, and that being a native Linux compilation, maybe the Proton version would have worked better.
Unless you have a Geforce 7xx or older it is still very bad as Nvidia is preventing the open-source drivers to work properly on newer cards with their cryptographically signed firmware.
I’ll speak on the GPGPU side as it’s a very underrated aspect. You can’t do CUDA with the opensource drivers and Nvidia will never help in that regard, because they rely on their licensing to force datacenters to buy high-margin datacenter GPUs like the A100 and H100 because the license of their proprietary drivers says you don’t have the right to host instances with consumer GPUs.
The CUDA limitation alone makes buying an Nvidia card completely pointless if you’re going to use opensource drivers.
Nothing has really changed for Nouveau yet.
A while back they released an open-source kernel driver for Turing and later (well, really they moved most of the driver to an on-GPU processor called the GSP, and released a kernel driver that’s a shim between the GSP and the userspace driver), and that opens the possibility for better open-source drivers in the future (Collabora is working on an open-source Vulkan driver for Nvidia, NVK, and Nouveau is working on making use of the GSP firmware), but it hasn’t changed anything for practical purposes yet.
I’m on an old GTX 970 using the 530 proprietary drivers. I have since switched back to Xorg due to various issues with wayland, mostly lack of support for virtual KVM (not Nvidia’s fault). I have never tried the open source drivers but this discussion makes me curious to do so.
Also, obligatory Nvidia, fuck you 🖕.
I get screen tearing on any driver other than the Nvidia driver. Also screen flicker. Open source drivers don’t work well for me. I guess still have to wait more.
Honestly at this point I think that before Nvidia does something to fix these problems we as users are going to switch to an AMD GPU.
I think we have been waiting too long and nothing happens, Nvidia must have possibly bigger interests than fixing their driver in Linux, I have been since 2020 with Linux and the Plasma experience with the proprietary driver in Xorg is still the same, I could believe that it is Plasma’s fault for being badly polished but no, or worse, that it is Linux’s fault, when it is Nvidia’s fault for their disinterest.
And I know that practically nobody can say overnight that they are going to buy a new GPU to have a polished experience, and that’s exactly what I mean, because maybe someone with an average salary will take 5 years to buy a new GPU, and in 5 years the situation with Nvidia will be the same.
one problem imo is that in nvidias view, their “linux drivers” is just CUDA, since that’s the majority of the market share, and those systems are mostly headless compute nodes anyway the desktop experience might not be worth supporting
As far as i have noticed nvidia open source drivers are still dogshit… Because nvidia got a stick up their ass… Anyway i recommend switching to radeon cards. I use radeon and so far i had not a single problem… Also terraria works well via proton for me
You can try your luck with the Nvidia’s open-source kernel driver. I dun think it will work any better than the proprietary one though.
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Without a doubt you will have a better experience with an AMD GPU in Plasma.
My desktop PC has a 1650S and a latest generation AMD 6/12 CPU, the experience in Plasma + Xorg is honestly bad, it seems that I am using a 1 core CPU in Windows 11 with 1GB of RAM (exaggerating, but I think you would understand) because when I resize a window it feels lagged and sticky, and when I do simple tasks like putting a window in the corner it takes like 2 seconds to do it, which it shouldn’t, while in Wayland this doesn’t happen, what has been said happens, some programs sometimes they run, other times they don’t.
Now, I have a humble Lenovo laptop with integrated UHD graphics, 12GB of RAM and a 2/4 CPU, both the Xorg and Wayland experiences are incredibly polished and you can’t even tell the difference, and that’s because both AMD and Intel are much more open when it comes to developing their drivers, among other things.
The only workable discreet GPUs with open source drivers that work right now are on Team Red (AMD) edit: and Intel.
There are good people working on Nvidia foss drivers but they have a long way to go.
Team Blue is viable as well, not as good as AMD’s yet but they’re getting there. I’ve been using an Intel Arc A770 on Linux for 6 months, it’s been pretty solid and Intel also has open source drivers.
I have tried the open-source drivers from time to time (last one v530) on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme and KDE Plasma (X11). Every time I switched to the open-source driver, the laptop unfortunately started to become uncomfortably hot – although the graphics card seemed to be working properly.
I looked on the net about this, and I remember reading that the open-source drivers were still in the testing phase. Sorry for not remembering more than this.
Things might get better with the 545 drivers, which should introduce direct scanout for Wayland.
The recent open source driver is only compatible with the latest Gen cards (I have a 2070 so it’s what I have installed) issue is even though it’s open source it doesn’t really fix any of the issues that plague Nvidia. There’s such a litany of unforgivable issues that just make no sense it honestly seems as if Nvidia is trying to make things as bad as possible. I’m assuming no one’s forked their open source drivers because they’re just too complex for the open source community to take hold and fix stuff. In fact just recently I had to completely uninstall all GPU drivers because otherwise my computer wouldn’t boot.
Nate said that one of the main contributors just worked on big improvement. He’ll talk more about it on this week KDE recap on his blog. https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/4177
I had read about that but I thought it specifically affected users of 2 GPU configurations, can I benefit as a single GPU home user?
Nouveau works with older cards, performance is still about half last I checked, and most of the advanced features are missing.
Terraria should be fine though, it’s a functional driver, just not much more.
