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Last edited by Shmerl on 16 February 2020 at 10:06 am UTC
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Point is: Someone wants to switch to Linux has a decent desktop computer set up and will head for the most popular distros Ubuntu or Mint. And to be fair, there is a reason why they are popular. They will get the recommendation to stick to the nice LTS versions and now someone comes along and tells them to become "nerds" and do all the crap they heard about Linux in their Windows era: Distro hopping, reading logs, system tinkering, perhaps some kernel compiling. And all because AMD can't get its shit together.
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Last edited by Shmerl on 16 February 2020 at 10:21 am UTC
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Now if
- NVidia is "the worst"
- and AMD (generally) is not good on Ubuntu
- and Ubuntu is supposedly the distro to go for
how should the normal (not even a newcomer) user who wants to play a game every now and then make any sense of that? And who would you blame for this fucked up situation?
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Last edited by Shmerl on 16 February 2020 at 10:35 am UTC
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That's what Steam lists under System Recommendations (despite what Feral might have criticized):
...
Sticking to what Steam says (yes, I know you don't like Steam) one would hardly pick anything else but Ubuntu as distribution. Sticking further to the recommendations one can't go wrong with NVidia.
And I suppose
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics
proves that.
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Use your own head to figure out which distros work better.
Last edited by Shmerl on 16 February 2020 at 10:59 am UTC
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Personally I would recommend an AMD GPU over Nvidia to friends and family on Linux, for several reasons I won't go into here. I would help them get started though. (And yeah, I'd probably recommend Mint as their first distro over something Arch based.) As for strangers on the Internet trying out Linux, surely they're not buying new hardware for that purpose alone. Either they've already got Nvidia or AMD and that's what they'll be running until they're familiar enough with the system to add a PPA or whatever.
This is a bit off topic, but I still don't get why I never experienced a single powerplay problem with my 5700 XT on Mint 19, even when I ran the stock 5.3 kernel, if they're so common for others. I had already enabled the Kisak PPA for Mesa when I upgraded from my old RX580, but that shouldn't have anything to do with it. I since switched to Ubuntu's mainline 5.4 and now 5.5, and it's been smooth running on both.
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That's exactly my point. Apart from checking the aforementioned option your NVidia experience on Ubuntu will be smooth. I've used GTX660, 950, 960, 1060 on several machines for the last 7+ years. Swapping the cards gave me never any problems, driver updates worked without any problems.
As already stated: The 5.3 kernel with Kisak's PPA on Ubuntu 18.04 works. No problems to speak of. (Well, as long as you don't need OpenGL. And that it took quite some time to figure out the proper kernel/Mesa PPA combination.) However, with 5.4 I get the above mentioned problems (I already had them on 19.10). And just searching the web for RX 5700 issues on Linux gave me the impression that I am neither the sole exception nor that it is restricted to Ubuntu as distribution.
Interesting, how many seem eager to let AMD off the hook, by suggesting that everything works oh so smooth with Kernel 5.5. Kernel 5.5 was released more than 6 months after the hardware could be bought, which was released pretty much the same day Kernel 5.2 turned stable. We don't want to force one of the two main GPU vendors showing something like "commitment" and provide day one support, right? But with 5.3 the driver should be there, ok? It sort of made it into 5.3, but then I have to read here that 5.4 is completely borked when it comes to Navi10. Who needs this with an LTS kernel anyway. So 5.5 fixes everything. Obviously not with my setup, because 5.5 also gave me powerplay issues on startup (I'll give it another try, just to be sure). Shall I wait for 5.6? Or should I file it under "lesson learned" and turn to the green side again? After all, I switched from ATI/AMD to NVidia 7 years ago because the drivers were just atrocious.