Arch Linux

james_1234567

Member

Registered: 2025-02-10

Posts: 7

How is the situation with nVidia today?

A question for Linux users: how dire is the current situation with Nvidia on Linux?

There are two options:

MSI Vector A16 HX A8WHG-052CN
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 12 GB
AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX
AMD Radeon 610M

or

ASUS TUF Tianxuan A16 2025 FA608WP370-0EAFXH8BX10
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 8 GB
AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
AMD Radeon 890M

They're roughly the same, but the first has a better graphics card—which I'm not sure will work under Linux, but the integrated graphics card is worse. The second has a decent integrated graphics card—and you can at least be sure it will work, but the main graphics card is worse... so, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?

Or am I looking at things completely wrong?

How big is the chances that nVidia will not run and i will stay with useless balast in laptop?

In general - is there any good laptop option for linux today, or it always a gambling and compromise?

Last edited by james_1234567 (2026-01-29 09:05:11)

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 73,306

Re: How is the situation with nVidia today?

How big is the chances that nVidia will not run and i will stay with useless balast in laptop?

Equal to the chances you fail to read https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA

All software, also all kernel modules and with that all graphics drivers have their ups and downs (and bugs) but the nvidia drivers have pretty reliably worked for more than two decades straight.
All problems w/ them stem from the proprietary factor and being OOT modules, the first one being addressed w/ nvidia-open the latter one tdb.

In general - is there any good laptop option for linux today, or it always a gambling and compromise?

There're laptops that are sold w/ *some* linux officially, you'd expect at least those to work OOTB
As a rule of thumb, the less exotic and "available next month" brand now the HW, the more likely you'll have an easy run.
Second-life'ing a written off office laptop will typically be a breeze (incredibly common and standardized HW setups, slightly aged so most peculiarities will already have been addressed) and little risk (low investment)

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Tiikerihai

Member

Registered: 2025-06-25

Posts: 16

Re: How is the situation with nVidia today?

Nvidia cards run fine with the driver and open kernel modules from nvidia, the most current nvidia drivers actually don't even have particularly horrible bugs from what I can tell (at least not on a 3060 Ti). Depending on your luck and how nvidia feels about blessing you with crippling bugs, it can be a decent experience. I personally hated using nvidia, but it was mostly just minor things that piled up to annoy me over time not a paperweight situation.

arbrandes

Member

Registered: 2026-01-11

Posts: 2

Re: How is the situation with nVidia today?

I have two nearly identical computers (same AM4 motherboard, same RAM, same generation CPUs)  that get used daily: one with a 40-series Nvidia card and nvidia-open, one with a 6000-series AMD card.  Both running Arch, both on Wayland, both get updated at the same exact cadence.  What I can tell you is that over the past few months the Nvidia box has been _significantly_ more stable than the AMD one.  The recent amdgpu troubles are why I finally ended up installing linux-lts: I run it on my AMD boxes (which helps, but doesn't solve all crashes), whereas I'm fine with the default Arch kernel on the Nvidia one.

Last edited by arbrandes (2026-01-31 18:34:54)