Wayland Nvidia
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The Linux community is abuzz about the prospects of running Nvidia graphics cards seamlessly with Wayland, a display server protocol that's gaining traction. As commenters dug into the topic, it became clear that while Wayland has made significant strides, its adoption is hindered by the fact that each desktop environment creates its own incompatible compositor due to the protocol's minimal feature set. Despite this, some users reported that most Steam titles run smoothly on Linux with Nvidia cards using tools like gamescope on Wayland, with one commenter noting that around 80% of games on ProtonDB have Platinum or Gold ratings, indicating excellent compatibility.
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This is an incomplete list of protocols that aren't part of core Wayland. Compositors implement additional protocols that aren't even part of this process (e.g. wlr-screencopy-unstable). See the wlroota protocols here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/tree/master...
Just because a protocol isn't part of Wayland, doesn't mean a standard protocol does not exists.
> Top 10 - 20% Platinum - 30% Gold - 10% Silver - 30% Bronze - 10% Borked
I'd probably say at least Gold is "reliably click and play without fiddling", so probably we're around 20-50% there right now, if we consider the top 10 games on Steam. Once you start considering top 100 or top 1000, it starts to look a lot better. But still, mainstream games are lagging seemingly.
Anti-cheats won't work, I keep a Windows drive just for Battlefield 6.
I run CachyOS and have been having a nightmare of a time on Wayland with my 3D Printer slicer and other tools I use my computer for being unusable.
The only thing that has ever kept me on Nvidia all these years is that they have been killing AMD performance wise for gaming.
The 9070XT is easily performant enough for the gaming I'm doing at the moment, and I can finally ditch the last major headache I've had in two and a half decades of being a Linux user - NVIDIA drivers - good riddance.
I don't play online games other than Helldivers 2 (so anti-cheat is a non-issue) which is working just fine at 70-80FPS max settings in 4K. Also getting good performance with RT off playing Ghostwire in 4K with settings as high as I can get them while staying above 60 FPS with Freesync.
Very few games don't work anymore, and most that don't are using kernel level anti-cheat or are generally hostile to users anyways (Fortnite and Destiny 2 could work, but they actively block Linux).
I main Fedora with an Nvidia 3080 and haven't had issues for quite some time now.
no issues.
I unfortunately still see a lot of Proton bug reports that don’t repro on AMD cards. Hoping that improves soon, I’m sure Valve would love to tell hardware makers that Nvidia GPUs are supported.
I am excluding games that rely on a kernelmode anticheat.
On the other hand when I tried a 6xx0 XT I always ran into an infamous "ring gfx timeout" GPU crash with certain applications on WINE [0]. Ended up giving that card to a cousin.
[0] Examples: https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/rant-ring-gfx-0-0-0-timeout-... https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/amdgpu-ring-gfx-0-0-0-timeou...
I'm trying to recall how NVidia behaved for games, but my daily driver is an old 1050 Ti that's been rock solid for years now, also X11.
Maybe the problem is Wayland not NVidia?
From CS2 (native) to the Final Fantasy XV demo (not native) and everywhere in between
The stuff that doesn't work typically don't work because kernel level anticheats, so a few competitive titles but even in that space many titles still run.
I think there are still some common anti cheats that don’t work. But single player has been flawless for me.
3840x2160@59.99700
3840x1080@143.99899
...there is a nvidia bug on some cards where they idle high with multi monitors ~50W. Pretty sure that's OS independent though
How can anybody seriously argue Linux is an OS ready for ordinary users when you have to do crap like this? Complete delusion.
There are Linux distributions that are better than Windows or iOS for grandma to use as well as distributions where you need to be an expert to do anything.
Buy hardware that supports Linux and you won't have to think about it.
At this point hardware incompatibility is a self-imposed problem.
“Regular” users have plenty of distribution choices where there are zero of these types of headaches.
Unlike Windows, right? Right? Guys?
Dare I say that you frankly have NO IDEA what the experience on modern Linux is today.
Of course, this is only one example of probably hundreds where an average user would have no clue how to fix their broken computer.
Also wevare talking here about archlinux + hyperland compositor, not the typical Fedora, Mint or Ubunti/Zorin distro. Tinkerer's gonna tinker while the other users just use their computer regardless of the OS.
If you want Linux that works, get a Chromebook. If you want to play games, use Bazzite.
For most distributions you can simply install the (proprietary) nvidia drivers and you're good to go.
There is generally no tweaking or command line changes necessary for Nvidia to work on Wayland, including multi-monitors with different resolutions and refresh rates.
But I think Pop is the best distro for this. System76 is highly incentivized to do exactly this and specifically with nvidia drivers and laptops (laptops create extra complications...). I can't promise it'll be a cure-all but it is worth giving a shot. I would try their forums too.
I totally get the frustration. I've been there, unfortunately. I hope you can get someone to help.
I know my ways around Arch, and in the about two years using CachyOS I never needed to intervene, with the exception of things like changed configs/split packages. But those are announced in advance on their webpages, be it Arch itself, or CachyOS, and also appear in good old Pacman in the terminal, or whichever frontend you fancy. It's THE DREAM!
What's lacking is maybe pre-packaged llm/machine learning stuff. Maybe I'm stupid, but they don't even have current llama.cpp, WTF? But at least Ollama is there. LM-Studio also has to be compiled by yourself, either via the AUR, or otherwise. But these are my only complaints.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/llama.cpp
I don't think I'd call the AUR "compiled by yourself". It's still a package manager. You're not running the config and make commands yourself. I mean what do you want? A precompiled binary? That doesn't work very well for something like llama.cpp. You'd have to deliver a lot more with it and pin the versions of the dependencies, which will definitely result in lost performance.Is running `yay -S llama.cpp` really that big of a deal? You're not intervening in any way different for any other package (that also aren't precompiled binaries)
Yes, exactly :-)
Haven't used yay or other aur helpers so far. Maybe that's why my systems run so stable?
Should maybe look into it.
Have used Yaourt on Arch in the far past, with...errm...varying success ;->
I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?
At that time there existed an AUR-helper called Yaourt, which I made heavy use of. But often in haste, sloppy. Which lead to many unecessary clean-up actions, but no loss of system. Meanwhile I had to use other stuff, so no Arch for a while. When the need for using other stuff was gone I considered several options, like Gentoo, but naa, I don't wanna compile anymore!1!! (Yes, Yes, I know they serve binpkgs now, but would they have my preferred USE-flags?) Maybe Debian, which can be fucking fast when run in RAM like Antix, but I had that for a while, and while it's usable, Debian as such is bizarre.
Anything Redhat? No thanks. SuSe? Same. So I came across CachyOS, and continued to use that, from the first "test-installation" running to this day, because it works for me, like I wrote before. Like a dream come true.
Remembering my experiences with Yaourt I abstained from using the AUR. And that worked very well for me, so far. Also the Gentoo-like 'ricing' comes for free with their heavily optimized binary packages, without compromising stability.
> I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?
Yes.
Are we clear now?
Since I don't play any more games than Minecraft and don't really need a fancy gpu I have switched to intel. Now I have two things which I buy intel only. GPUs and WiFi. I have had one glitch with opengl under a VM, but I am not sure that is intel only since it also had issues with my Nvidia card.
I recommend everyone not update those drivers unless they're not working, and don't be afraid to downgrade. Almost every version has people saying on their system something doesn't work.
But Systemd? That's on most distros these days. I'm pretty sure it is on all of those in the top 10.
Also, the OP is using CachyOS. You can tell b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶a̶n̶o̶ from the neofetch logo. But, I'll mention that if you checkout distrowatch, Arch based distros are incredibly common. Over the past 12 months the most downloaded distros are CachyOS (Arch), Mint (Deb/Ubuntu), MX (Deb), Debian, Endeavour (Arch), Pop (Ubuntu), Manjaro (Arch), Ubuntu, Fedora, Zorin (Deb/Ubuntu).
That said, you don't have to do any of this for either Endeavour (which I use) nor Manjaro (my old distro of choice). Along with Pop, one of the main motivations for these distros is Nvidia support. Really I don't expect most people to even be facing those problems these days. On Endeavour I've only run into one Nvidia problem over the last 5 years and it was when a beta driver conflicted with the most recent kernel. Super easy fix once I realized the problem.
On a side note/friendly reminder:
anyone that's using linux these days with an Nvidia card I suggest making sure your /efi partition is >1GB (at least 2GB but give it some headroom. Disk is still cheap). If you're putting the drivers in the kernel (you should), like done here, those are going to take up a lot of space. (If you get a space error, run `sudo du -ch --max-depth=3 /efi | sort -hr` to see the problem. You can, usually, safely delete any of the `initrd-fallback` versions and rerun `sudo reinstall-kernels`. They'll be built again but this will usually give you the headroom you need)
So the people on Hackernews with adblock aren't reading this.
Reader mode also available but not even needed.
And a lot of places have ads that are okay. I mean I still dislike them, but they don't block half the page as in this instance. And when I see that I won't even bother to open it in Firefox.
No more drivers is just..false?
The rest was true up to roughly 3 years ago. Now I'm a happy camper
Dunno anything about dozens of packages, I installed 1 (one) package from my distro and haven't touched it since, no issues with updates either. That same friend with an AMD card keeps getting random hard PC freezes during gaming though.
Also absolutely zero issues with lags/latency for me (on GNOME. I did experience a bunch of weird bugs with KDE, but again - no lags)
One thing that is very real is DirectX 12 performance. This one really does suffer due to poor nvidia drivers. Hope they iron it out at some point
Dozen of packages, official packages, you need bunch of, like, 590.44.01-1 packages installed: https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/deb...
Lags: sorry, I have no more nvidia and can't record video.
(edit: formatting)
> official packages
Which is unfortunately not a good thing when it comes to NVIDIA. "Modern" distros package those for you, which is why I install linux-cachyos-nvidia-open [0] now and previously nvidia-driver-${version} [1] when I was using Pop! OS, both of which worked without a single issue for me from the word "go". My point is: it's not all doom and gloom, there's life to be had and it's not that worse than AMD cards.
[0] https://packages.cachyos.org/package/cachyos/x86_64/linux-ca... [1] https://github.com/pop-os/nvidia-graphics-drivers
What I don't get is if these are proscribed steps (and they do read as such) why are they not automated with the module install? Why are we still fighting these issues if the 'workaround' is linear and well described? Is it as flimsy a reason as "write-an-article, collect-advertising-revenue" rather than contribute code to the installer?