I’ve been trying Linux Mint on my old dell laptop with an nvidia GPU and it’s been just one impossible issue after the other.
Even games that have native linux versions like Valheim don’t run if I’m running off the GPU (but run if i switch to the integrated intel gpu but with terrible performance). Some games that work with proton work fine but have tons of weird issues like not being able to type specific characters on the keyboard, or the game and the entire OS just randomly freezing after 15-20 minutes - it happened in both warframe and guild wars 2 for example. Every time it happened I had to do a hard reboot since it was completely unresponsive.
I tried installing bottles and couldn’t get through the basic setup of the GOG launcher without getting black screens in it. There were some workarounds with no-sandbox launch arguments at one point but I think I eventually gave up on it. Steam had tons of issues with launchers freezing, or steam itself getting stuck on constant shader updates every day I start the game.
I tried changing proton versions, installing wine and lutris manually, changing nvidia drivers (randomly trying other one since there’s no useful info online about which to pick or which ones even work…) and it never got to a satisfactory point. I still have no idea which drivers im supposed to be using (if it’s not the recommended ones that come with Mint), or how to properly update them manually.
I’ve had steam somethines just not run at all, I run it and nothing happens. I see it in the process manager, kill it ,restart it… it gets the temporary update popup and then disappears with no error message whatsoever.
I actually own a steam deck and I never had any major issues with it, so my only conclusion is that this time it’s the fault of either linux mint (which is supposed to be the stable, no-nonsense OS), or the different hardware - probably the GPU.
So yeah… is the conclusion wrong, or is it really simply pointless to try linux with nvidia?
edit: hardware info:
GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile
CPU: i7-7700HQ
I’m currently running Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon
Nvidia drivers in use are the latest ones available from the driver manager (currently nvidia-driver-550).
Will try PopOS! next
You must log in or register to comment.
For gaming, you should be using the most current version of nvidia’s proprietary drivers that supports your GPU, unless that GPU is really old. Have a look at this page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/
If your GPU isn’t listed there, use the most recent driver you can find.
If your GPU is on the 470.xx supported list, try 470.223.02, as that seems to be the last in the series.
If your GPU is on the 390.xx supported list, try 390.157.
If your GPU is on one of the other lists, it’s a really old chipset and you should be using the Nouveau driver that’s built into the kernel.
If you’re using the nvidia proprietary drivers on a system that also has Nouveau installed, make sure you’ve blacklisted Nouveau so that you’re loading the correct driver.
Dual-graphics laptops are a bit of a bear to work with under Linux generally. Good luck.
I wouldn’t say unusable but NVIDIA definitely makes things way more painful than they ought to be with their closed source drivers and general stubbornness to support newer technologies under Linux, see Wayland. Mint’s generally older packages also might be working against you.
In my experience, I’ve had the smoothest experiences with gaming focused/adjacent distros which just include the NVIDIA drivers out of the box, such as Nobara or Bazzite. Those just work for the most part with no user intervention, and you don’t even have to think about it.
Anecdotal, of course, but I’ve been gaming with almost zero big issues on POP! _OS with the baked in nVidia drivers since half a year ago. Both via Steam and via Lutris w/ Wine/ProtonGE. Some bugs here and there, but nothing that makes it impossible to get a satisfactory experience.
Of course it’s a different distro which you might not like, but if you really can’t make your games work on Mint do consider changing to POP! at least for the time being
+1 for pop, used it for 2 years with very few issues on an nvidia gpu
It might be Mint or an issue with your laptop. I’ve been using Arch for a while and haven’t had major performance issues. Before I used Arch, I used Pop!OS and didn’t have any issues either. What are your laptop specs? Have you already looked into Nvidia Optimus? Have you tried other distros?
It’s probably something with your OS.
People like to meme about Nvidia being unusable on Linux, but before switching to AMD I was running various Nvidia GPUs for more than a decade and they were always rock-stable.
Running Fedora 38 on both desktop and laptop, both former Windows machines with NVIDIA GPU (laptop has the intel IGPU and NVIDIA DGPU). I’ve been able to run every single game I’ve tried (Elden Ring, Mass Effect Andromeda, Starcraft 2, Sea of Thieves, etc) using Steam+Proton. In some cases Proton GE was required, and on the laptop there was a special proton launch argument required for Elden Ring to work. Additionally, on Wayland there is one specific issue being worked on (explicit sync) that does cause some annoyance, flickering apps etc. But it feels like NVIDIA is catching up in terms of Linux compatibility, hang in there!
Same. 2080ti. Nobara gives me an almost perfect experience. Every single games works great.
I actually own a steam deck and I never had any major issues with it, so my only conclusion is that this time it’s the fault of either linux mint
Isn’t Steam Deck use AMD and not NVIDIA? Btw, playing CS:GO2 on Nvidia 3070 Ti on Linux desktop using driver version 545 doesn’t give me a major issue so far.
It is, I’m just saying that even games that worked fine on steam deck had issues on my nvidia laptop so I doubt its the game’s fault.
Currently running Pop!_OS 22.04 with a 3090 GPU, and it purrs like a happy cat. Getting significantly better performance than when the same hardware ran Windows 10.
From my own experience on my older Lenovo Legion with the optimus GPUs (intel integrated, nvidia 3060m dedicated) it was always a bit of pain.
Though I think I settled on using optimus-manager and with just the right tweaks it worked, when I wanted to game I restarted my whole desktop session to run on the nvidia gpu.Are you using bumblebee/primus with optirun/primusrun ? back before these were the main pain points. (I am also assuming you are on X11 Desktop Environment - afaik wayland on older nvidia gpus is basically impossible. Also, are you sure you are using the proprietary nvidia driver and not nouveau? Nouveau is unusable for gaming.)
I’m on EndeavourOS and it works without issues. I’m using a 3070TI, maybe older cards are more troublesome? Like others have said, I’d give other distros a try.
I have had zero issues with nVidia on multiple Leap machines. nVidia works great on SUSE / OpenSUSE since nVidia hosts their own repo to support SUSE, OpenSuse, (and maybe REL?) Since it is an nVidia package it works as expected and the nVidia configuration GUI app gives you granular control
I have some window resizing/tiling/moving lag spikes with KDE and notifications lag the whole system with kde/gnome. This sis apparently a bug in the nvidia driver. Besides that games run pretty much perfectly. The card gets hotter than on Windows with PoE but that’s basically it. For reference, I play PoE, league (for now), ffxiv, D2 mods, last epoch, some indie games, bg3,… I have a 3080 card and a ryzen 5800x processor.
Always using the newest proprietary driver of course.
Try a different distro? Linux mint wouldn’t output display on my Nvidia laptop but Ubuntu worked just fine.
I’ve been having the best experience with a laptop with an Nvidia GPU on my fedora 39.
Not my experience at all. Running :
- Ubuntu 23.10
- NVIDIA 525.147.05
- latest Steam stable (1705108172) with latest Proton
and I have been playing “flat” and VR games with no tinkering for years now. I honestly spent at most 1h on drivers or compatibility since I bought my desktop. In fact thinking back I probably spent more time on Windows years ago than now.
