3

A Linux-using colleague wanted to buy a new laptop and identified one with an Nvidia GeForce graphics card.

Now I know there were old stories of Nvidia cards not working well with Linux.

But there is the more recent issue of Nvidia botching on Wayland, but maybe finally coming round to Linux support.

What may the timelines be for this to enter the kernel and thence distributions?

As I type this, I am prompted with

And if that's the safest course to take, that'd be good to know at least!

Peter Mortensen
  • 1,029
  • 1
  • 8
  • 10
Rusi
  • 479
  • 4
  • 12

2 Answers2

5

  • The current Nvidia driver supports GBM, Wayland and hardware acceleration with XWayland just fine. (since 470.x series driver)

  • There is no timeline for "this to enter the kernel", that's not how any of this works. -> the Nvidia driver is an external kernel module. The driver itself will support various GFX cards and kernel versions, usually kernel support is fairly up to date. -> The Nvidia driver has some shim code and you build it against your kernel (or your distribution / package maintainer has already done this for you)... that is the extent of kernel support needed.

  • Every distro is different and given that there are handfuls of them, I certainly could not answer your question, but; Archlinux, Fedora, etc all support running Wayland + Nvidia just fine. Basically, any modern distro shipping up-to-date or bleeding edge software.

That all said, surely there are some cases where Nvidia + Wayland may have some rough edges (your second link about hybrid GFX may be one). In other cases, depending on what software you rely on; Wayland may not be a good option -- Say, for example; if you rely on software written for Xorg that doesn't run properly in XWayland or where there is no Wayland counterpart.

Personally, while I am not currently an nvida user (AMD here) -- I still do not use Wayland because Gnome-Wayland is too rough around the edges for me and more importantly; I have software that I rely on that requires Xorg; XWayland won't work (so Wayland isn't an option anyway).

If you colleague has good reason to use/prefer Nvidia -- they will not be forced to use Wayland. They could try it out and always switch back to an Xorg session, instead.

EDIT: As suggested below, it would probably be a good idea to do some research on potential issues your colleague might face, with both software and hardware. For example, you could consult bug trackers for your preferred Desktop Environment and also research the laptop's linux support, in general.

jrdnjhntsn
  • 478
  • 1
  • 9
  • 1
    I would probably add some advice to first search for possible issues on DE's buzillas. https://bugs.kde.org/ for KDE-Plasma. Since, at the end of the day… the real question for the user is : will my DE work troublefree ? Irrespective of what (kernel / graphic driver / display server / it's clients / the protocol in between) actually caused the trouble. +1 for your answer anyway. – MC68020 Jan 29 '22 at 10:26
  • 1
    _"I have software that I rely on that requires Xorg; XWayland won't work"_ - Out of curiosity, what software? I'm pretty surprised actually, because XWayland is just a specialized Xorg build. Until fairly recently, it was actually built and released by the Xorg project. – marcelm Jan 29 '22 at 18:58
  • @marcelm - Easystoke Gesture Recognition software... It's not surprising at all; There is a lot of features/stuff from Xorg that Wayland doesn't implement / have counterparts for... and there is no quality gesture recognition software for Wayland, at all... That aside, I've hit issues with other software too (including common stuff like Wine). For my use, Wayland just isn't there yet. probably won't be for some time yet. – jrdnjhntsn Jan 30 '22 at 00:40
  • @MC68020 - took your advice and edited my answer. suggested researching compatibility + potential issues with both the software (like DE) and hardware. – jrdnjhntsn Jan 31 '22 at 15:55
2

NVIDIA binary Linux drivers do support Wayland.

A linux using colleague was wanting to buy a new laptop and identified one with nvidia GeForce graphics.

I'd strongly recommend against buying a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU for Linux. In fact I'd strongly recommend against buying a laptop with any discrete GPU because Linux even in 2022 doesn't play well with them: it's extremely cumbersome to select a discrete GPU.

If your friend doesn't play modern games, something like 11/12th gen Intel Core CPU or Ryzen 5000/6000 APU is a much better option.

Lastly with NVIDIA graphics you cannot use secure UEFI boot (you technically can but it's extremely complicated and tedious - on my desktop PC I just disabled secure boot altogether).

Lastly my personal opinion is that Wayland is the solution in search for a problem (yes, that's sarcasm). It's misdesigned, it requires an enormous amount of code to enable it, it's catered solely for Gnome.

Artem S. Tashkinov
  • 26,392
  • 4
  • 33
  • 64