It’s no surprise that NVIDIA is gradually dropping support for older videocards, with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed. What’s more surprising is the terrible way t…
Even now, CUDA is gold standard for data science / ML / AI related research and development. AMD is slowly brining around their ROCm platform, and Vulcan is gaining steam in that area. I’d love to ditch my nvidia cards and go exclusively AMD but nvidia supporting CUDA on consumer cards was a seriously smart move that AMD needs to catch up with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even now, CUDA is gold standard for data science / ML / AI related research and development. AMD is slowly brining around their ROCm platform, and Vulcan is gaining steam in that area. I’d love to ditch my nvidia cards and go exclusively AMD but nvidia supporting CUDA on consumer cards was a seriously smart move that AMD needs to catch up with.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.