Nvidia will stop price gouging you for their cards and features when you stop buying them.

BlinkerFluid@lemmy.one to Technology@beehaw.org – 308 points –

Sorry if I'm not the first to bring this up. It seems like a simple enough solution.

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Funnily enough I just, like an hour before reading this post bought an AMD card. And I've been using NVIDIA since the early 00's.

For me it's good linux support. Tired of dealing with their drivers.

Will losing me as a customer make a difference to NVIDIA? Nope. Do I feel good about ditching a company that doesn't treat me well as a consumer? Absolutely!

Suddenly your video card is as mundane and trivial a solved problem as your keyboard or mouse.

It just works and you never have to even think about it.

To even consider that a reality as someone who's used Linux since Ubuntu 8.10.... I feel spoiled.

Those were rough days. I started with Dapper Drake but there was no way to actually get my trackpad drivers until 8.04. Kudos for sticking with linux

I was hooked. It was the first time my PC felt as transparent and lie-free as notebook paper.

Like, there's nothing to hide because nothing is. It's pure, truthful freedom and that meant more to me than raw usability. I tried to do everything possible on Linux that i was told I couldn't do, hell, I ran Team Fortress 2 and Half Life in wine way pre-proton.

and it sucked, but it was cool tho!

Don't even get me started on linux audio support.

I recall exactly once back in the day that Ubuntu actually just played audio through a laptop I installed it on and I damn near lost my mind.

like 30 minutes ago I installed Mint on a laptop and literally everything just worked as if I installed windows from the backup image. (I'm not sure power states are working 100% but it's close enough and probably would with 3rd party driver)

I used some Ubuntu derivative for recording shitty music me and my buddy made in a trailer. OSS off of a turtle beach soundcard with a hacked together driver, crammed into a shitty Windows Vista era desktop.

I felt like some sort of junk wizard.

I use arch these days, Garuda mainly. I've done the whole song and dance from Arch to Gentoo. I know the system, now I want to relax and let something I suck at, giving myself features be more in the hands of a catering staff of folks and the Garuda boys know how to pamper.

The dragons kinda... yeah, the art's kinda cringe but damn, this is the definition of fully featured.

I was definitely a junk wizard back in the day, as I've grown older and have less time and more money I just want stuff that works. I used to build entire (pretty acceptably decent) home theater systems out of $150 worth of stuff off craigslist and yard sales. When you know how it all works you can cobble together some real goofy shit that works.

It's about the exact amount of cringe I expect from a non mainstream linux distro. but aye who doesn't like dragons and eagles? I'll have to try it out on this old zenbook.

Absolutely indeed! I'll never buy an Nvidia card because of how anti-customer they are. It started with them locking out PCI passthrough when I was building a gaming Linux machine like ten years ago.

I wonder if moving people towards the idea of just following the companies that don't treat them with contempt is an angle that will work. I know Steph Sterling's video on "consumer" vs "customer" helped crystallize that attitude in me.

I'm not familiar with that video but I'm intrigued. I'll have to check it out.

I don't know. I don't have much faith in people to act against companies in a meaningful way. Amazon and Walmart are good examples. I feel like it's common knowledge at this point that these companies are harmful but still they thrive.

Have a 3060ti, was thinking of moving to Linux. Is there no support from Nvidia?

You'll almost certainly be perfectly fine. AMD cards generally work a lot smoother, and the open source drivers means things can be well supported all the time and it's great.

On Nvidia, in my experience, it's occasionally a hassle if you're using a bleeding edge kernel (which you won't be if you're on a "normal" distro), where something changes and breaks the proprietary Nvidia driver... And if Nvidia drops support for your graphics card in their driver you may have issues upgrading to a new kernel because the old driver won't work on the new kernel. But honestly, I wouldn't let any of this get in the way of running Linux. You have a new card, you'll probably upgrade before it's an issue, and the proprietary driver is something we all get mad about, but it mostly works well and there's a good chance you won't really notice any issues.

I ran my 1060 just fine for a few year. Nvidia has an official, but proprietary driver that might not run well on some distro's. Personally I haven't had any issues, though it would be better to stick with xorg and not wayland. Wayland support on nvidia I've heard isn't great, but it does work

This. You're mostly at the mercy of their proprietary drivers. There's issues, like lagging Wayland support as mentioned. They will generally work though, I don't want to dissuade you from trying out Linux.

There is an open source driver too, but it doesn't perform well.

Nvidia on Linux is better than ever before, even over the past couple of months there were tremendous improvements. As long as you use X11 you will have a pretty good gaming experience across the board, but Nvidia driver updates are often a headache. With AMD, you don't even have to think about it, unless Davinci Resolve forces you to, but even then it's a better situation.

Anyway, comments like "you'll be 100% fine" are not really based on reality, occasionally Nvidia will break things. However if you use the BTRFS filesystem with Timeshift (or even that wretched Snapper) set up, then this is merely a minor inconvenience. (for example before I moved to Arch, Ubuntu pushed an Nvidia update that broke my system, happened in June..)

Depends on the distro. Otherwise you'll have to install the nvidia drivers yourself, and if memory serves it's not as smooth of a process as on Windows. If you use Pop OS you should be golden, as that Linux distro does all the work for you.