this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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I've had so many problems with Nvidia GPUs on Linux over the years that I now refuse to buy anything Nvidia. AMD cards work flawlessly and get very long-term support.
I'm with you, I know we've had a lot of recent Linux converts, but I don't get why so many who've used Linux for years still buy Nvidia.
Like yeah, there's going to be some cool stuff, but it's going to be clunky and temporary.
When people switch to Linux they don’t do a lot of research beforehand. I, for one, didn’t know that Nvidia doesn’t work well with it until I had been using it for years.
To be fair, Nvidia supports their newer GPUs well enough, so you may not have any problems for a while. But once they decide to end support for a product line, it's basically a death sentence for that hardware. That's what happened to me recently with the 470 driver. Older GPU worked fine until a kernel update broke the driver. There's nobody fixing it anymore, and they won't open-source even obsolete drivers.
I JUST ran into this issue myself. I’m running Proxmox on an old Laptop and wanted to use its 750M…. Which is one of those legacy cards now that I guess means I’d need to downgrade the kernel to use?
I’m not knowledgeable enough to know the risks or work I’d be looking at to get it working so for now, it’s on hiatus.
You might be able to use the Nouveau driver with the 750M. Performance won't be great, but might be sufficient if it's just for server admin.
It's a good way for people to learn about fully hostile companies to the linux ecosystem.
Similar for me. All the talk about what software Linux couldn't handle, I didn't learn that Linux is incompatible with Nvidia until AFTER I updated my GPU. I don't want to buy another GPU after less than a year, but Windows makes me want to do a sudoku in protest... but also my work and design software wont run properly on Linux and all anybody can talk about is browsers and games.
I'm damned whether I switch or not.
got that backwards
Linus openly hated Nvidia, but I suspect Nvidia started it
If you only suspect then you never heard the entire quote and only know the memes.
My point is they dont work together. I can believe Nvidia 'started' it, but it doesnt matter or help me solve my problem. I've decided I want to try Linux but I can't afford another card so I'm doing what I can.
You somehow still learned wrong, and I don't understand how any of that happened. Nvidia not working well with Linux is so widely known and talked about, I knew about it, and the actual reason (which is the reverse of what you think), for several years before switching. I feel like you must have never tried to look anything up, spent any time in a place like lemmy or any forums with a Linux focus and basically must have decided to and kept yourself in some bubble of ignorance and no connection to learn anything.
This is an uncharitable interpretation of what I said.
Nvidia doesn't tell me it doesn't work. Linux users do. When I first used Linux for coding all those years ago, my GPU wasn't relevant, nobody mentioned it during my code bootcamp or computer science certification several years ago, and ubuntu and Kubuntu both booted fine.
When I upgraded my GPU, I got Nvidia. It was available and I knew what to expect. Simple as.
Then as W10 (and W11) got increasingly intolerable, I came to Linux communities to learn about using Linux as a Windows replcement, looking into distros like Mint and Garuda, and behold: I come across users saying Linux has compatibility issues with Nvidia. Perhaps because it is 'so well known' most don't think to mention it, I learned about it from a random comment on a meme about gaming.
I also looked into tutorials on getting Affinity design software to work on which distros, and the best I could find was shit like, I finally got it to run so long as I don't [do these three basic functions].
I don't care who started it, I can already believe it's the for-profit company sucking up to genAI. But right now that doesn't help me. I care that it's true and that's the card I have, and I'm still searching for distros that will let me switch and meets work needs and not just browsing or games.
I'm here now, aware that they don't work, still looking for the best solution I can afford, because I did look up Linux.
Nvidia's poor Linux support has been a thing for decades.
If at all, the situation has recently improved. And that only after high-profile Linux developers telling Nvidia to get their shit together.
People buy Nvidia for different reasons, but not everyone faces any issues with it in Linux, and so they see no reason to change what they're already familiar with.
Same. Refuse to use NVIDIA going forward for anything.
I just replaced my old 1060 with a Radeon 6600 rx myself.
Yeah, I stopped using Nvidia like 20 years ago. I think my last Nvidia card may have been a GeForce MX, then I switched to a Matrox card for a time before landing on ATI/AMD.
Back then AMD was only just starting their open source driver efforts so the “good” driver was still proprietary, but I stuck with them to support their efforts with my wallet. I’m glad I did because it’s been well over a decade since I had any GPU issues, and I no longer stress about whether the hardware I buy is going to work or not (so long as the Kernel is up to date).
I successfully ran local Llama with llama.cpp and an old AMD GPU. I'm not sure why you think there's no other option.
Llama.cpp now supports Vulkan, so it doesn't matter what card you're using.
I mean... my 6700xt dont have offical rocm support, but the rocm driver works perfectly fine for it. The difference is amd hasnt but the effort in testing rocm on their consumer cards, thus cant make claims support for it.
ML?
Is that a huge deal for the average user?
I had an old NVidia gtx 970 on my previous machine when I switched to Linux and it was the source of 95% of my problems.
It died earlier this year so I finally upgraded to a new machine and put an Intel Arc B580 in it as a stop gap in hopes that video cards prices would regain some sanity eventually in a year or two. No problems whatsoever with it since then.
Now that AI is about to ruin the GPU market again I decided to bite the bullet and get myself an AMD RX 9070 XT before the prices go through the roof. I ain't touching NVidia's cards with a 10 foot pole. I might be able to sell my B580 for the same price I originally bought it for in a few months.
Sadly GPU passthrough only worked on Nvidia cards when I was setting up my server, so I had to get one of them :(