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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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 🖕.
Which DE are you using? I’m on KDE Plasma and honestly the Xorg experience is simply disgusting, with Wayland it’s much more usable but I suffer from the inconvenience that some programs work, others don’t.
Gnome and other DE work fine, but I’m so used to Plasma that I would find it hard to leave it. 🥲
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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.
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.
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.
