this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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  • Price: 370$
  • Model: Asus ROG Strix G15 (G531GV)
  • CPU: Intel I7 9th Gen
  • GPU: Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB
  • Ram: 16GB
  • Storage: Samsung SSD 980 Pro 1TB (NVME)
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 minutes ago

Solid device

However, your battery life is going to be like 2 minutes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 37 minutes ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

2060, 9th gen and 1Tb SSD for 400 is a good deal in my opinion. Don’t fear the nvidia BS spreaded here, with an up to date distro, it is no problem

I use my 780 with endeavourOS and latest proprietary driver without issues. I had to switch some packages from the nauvau edition to the nvidia editions. (Vulcan and cuda stuff)

In kde settings about page you can easily check if vulcan is running good

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

The main limitation of Nvidia gpu's is you can't use Wayland on most WM's (you can on Ubuntu, but then you're using Ubuntu)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

NVIDIA drivers are notoriously bad. They break and WILL depreciate your card eventually, forcing you to switch to the slow open source drivers.

I have had two cards lose support. It's absurd.

But for 370 it's kinda a steal honestly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

It's 2000 series, so they are supported by the new OSS driver, no?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Yes, but for how long?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I would love to here more info about your issue, I bet there was just a misunderstanding 😇

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I have Nvidia gt210 in office, and latest Linux mint installed, no proprietary drivers for my GPU is installable, they exist, yes, but you can't install them on latest Linux mint

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

That seems like old nvidia card (shortly googled). For those, nvidia deserves all the fuck you it gets 😂 they don’t offer proprietary drivers for legacy card on newer kernel. For most, there exist community patched versions, but nouveau is often more feature rich (and works with wayland!). Many legacy nvidia cards require you to boot from legacy BiOS and won’t work from UEFI -> is is especially infuriating on old Mac, since those need to boot from a CD in order to be able to easily install Linux using legacy bios (there are ways to convert a EFI install, but I, till now, always failed that approach..). At least, as soon as you have grub2 and legacy bios set up, you can use grub to boot feom a iso file on your harddisk without switching back to EFI)

This card in the laptop is not legacy and even “works” with wayland on proprietary drivers

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 minutes ago

Thank you for your reply) most of the negative opinions people have about proprietary drivers is exactly this, they become obsolete, open source drivers on the other hand, does not, you and me agree on this, love your positive outlook on everything, feels refreshing, thank you)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Older, out of support, nvidia drivers tend to break from time to time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 26 minutes ago

I'm pretty sure it will be supported for more than a couple of years, my 930m (not even mx) is still receiving the latest driver updates

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I'd tell them to knock 50-70 off for the condition of the surfaces. No idea about the model and specs or if that's worth it but that's an ugly case on it and I would be grossed out using it, would probably have to tape a sheet of paper over the worn out spots to be comfortable touching that surface.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago

My laptop, similar Taiwanese brand, is fairly new and already beginning to look like this. I don't know why they have to be such cheapskates with the crappy fake metal finish. Somehow we can find enough aluminum to make disposable Coke cans out of it but it's too expensive for a laptop casing.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 hours ago

If there's nothing wrong beyond the hideous consmetic damage sure.

Some distros have some very specific images like this one that I would install if I had the same computer: 1000010590

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

Nvidia works just fine on Linux despite what anyone says. People are just upset because it's a closed source driver. I have used Nvidia exclusively for like decades without issue. Just purchased an RTX3090ti (upgrade from a 2060) for Ollama, InvokeAI, and ComfyUi. Plus I do a lot of gaming. All of it works right out of the box with no tweaking.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 hours ago (6 children)

My experience with Nvidia (granted, 3 years old experience):

Going with the closed source driver means stuff breaking each kernel update. Going with the opensource driver (while it may work for you): not everything is supported.

So its not just "people being annoyed with Nvidia" i'd say.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Did you use your package manager and dkms? You need to recompile the driver hook with each kernel update.

I've had Nvidia cards since the Riva TNT2 and it's been reasonably smooth sailing... 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago

Keeps jumping to the latest kernel instead of the latest stable release.

Blames nvidia for not keeping up...

I've been on Manjaro for years and have literally NEVER had your issue. Why, because I don't just automatically change to the latest kernel and then wonder why shit doesn't work.

After an update, it'll tell me if a newer kernel is available, I'll look at it and if its a new stable release I'll change to it with no issue because an NVIDIA update was likely included with that update.

Stop forcing early adoption on your computer and then blaming others when it fucks up your shit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Going with the closed source driver means stuff breaking each kernel update.

What distro are you using if nvidia breaks after every kernel update? What do you need to do to fix the breakage?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Debian.

Well, every kernel update is overstated maybe, but I had my fixed workflow of dropping to text mode and reinstalling the latest drivers from vendor, which is annoying as hell.

Dropped the card after meddling about for almost a year. Been using Linux since slackware was still hip & happening.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (4 children)

Man I wish my time with Nvidia was as easy as you claim it to be.

I had a 1080 Ti that I was forced to sell because Nvidia drivers made my PC unusable.

The performance drop going from a 1080 Ti to a RX 580 was huge, but it was well worth it for a system that would actually work reliably.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago

I've had lots of problems with Nvidia over the years; you're lucky not to. Latest has been with Wayland which are ongoing. That being said Nvidia drivers are much better generally than they used to be, and I've not had the myriad of small issues I used to get.

This is less to do with them being closed source drivers so much as their drivers being poorly maintained in the past. They seem much better maintained but even now the software support lags behind windows - you have to use 3rd party open source software to make use of the streaming features for example.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 hours ago (5 children)

Cant recommend anything with Nvidia.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 hours ago (4 children)

Sorry but could you please elaborate. I've been using nvidia forever in linux machines both at work and at home. I work in AI so using nvidia gpus is a must. Maybe there's something that I missed but my experience has been pretty solid so far.

At home I am using openSUSE tumbleweed KDE wayland and at work ubuntu headless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Yeah, Tumbleweed has a good track record with NVIDIA drivers in my experience. As with updates in general.

Although I still use X11 as Wayland still has graphical issues in some apps for me. Usually Flatpaks. That makes it unusable for me for the time being.

Edit: I have an older card (1050ti), so maybe I don't get the latests drivers anymore?? On version 550.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

These days ROCm support is more common than a few years ago so you're no longer entirely dependent on CUDA for machine learning. (Although I wish fewer tools required non-CUDA users to manually install Torch in their venv because the auto-installer assumes CUDA. At least take a parameter or something if you don't want to implement autodetection.)

Nvidia's Linux drivers generally are a bit behind AMD's; e.g. driver versions before 555 tended not to play well with Wayland.

Also, Nvidia's drivers tend not to give any meaningful information in case of a problem. There's typically just an error code for "the driver has crashed", no matter what reason it crashed for.

Personal anecdote for the last one: I had a wonky 4080 and tracing the problem to the card took months because the log (both on Linux and Windows) didn't contain error information beyond "something bad happened" and the behavior had dozens of possible causes, ranging from "the 4080 is unstable if you use XMP on some mainboards" over "some BIOS setting might need to be changed" and "sometimes the card doesn't like a specific CPU/PSU/RAM/mainboard" to "it's a manufacturing defect".

Sure, manufacturing defects can happen to anyone; I can't fault Nvidia for that. But the combination of useless logs and 4000-series cards having so many things they can possibly (but rarely) get hung up on made error diagnosis incredibly painful. I finally just bought a 7900 XTX instead. It's slower but I like the driver better.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Finally, thanks for the clear cut answer. I don't have any experience with training on AMD but the errors from nvidia are usually very obscure.

As for using gpus other than nvidia, there's a slew of problems. Mostly that on cloud where most of the projects are deployed, our options seem either limited to nvidia gpus, or cloud tpus.

Each AI experiment can cost usually in thousands of dollars and use a cluster of GPUs. We have built and modified our system for fully utilizing such an environment. I can’t even imagine shifting to Amd gpus at this point. The amount of work involved and the red tape shudder

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Oh yeah, the equation completely changes for the cloud. I'm only familiar with local usage where you can't easily scale out of your resource constraints (and into budgetary ones). It's certainly easier to pivot to a different vendor/ecosystem locally.

By the way, AMD does have one additional edge locally: They tend to put more RAM into consumer GPUs at a comparable price point – for example, the 7900 XTX competes with the 4080 on price but has as much memory as a 4090. In systems with one or few GPUs (like a hobbyist mixed-use machine) those few extra gigabytes can make a real difference. Of course this leads to a trade-off between Nvidia's superior speed and AMD's superior capacity.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

The only two things that have ever been broken by an update for me are hyprland and Nvidia drivers, multiple times

Even then that seems to have stopped happening recently though they patched one of the reallg big issues this year

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

My experience (and many others') has been contradictory to yours. AMD, on the other hand, pretty much always works without any fuss because they release first-party open source drivers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Do you mean in terms of gaming? I admit that I don't do much gaming on linux. Usually just development and browsing.

I also use proprietary nvidia drivers if that makes a difference.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 hours ago (5 children)

Gaming laptops have some of the worst builds. They break down very easily. This is why people go for Thinkpads and Elitebooks. I think that you can get yourself a 7th/8th gen Thinkpad Pxy, P1 or X1 Extreme series with a gDPU, and that would be a better deal - but do remember, they all have Nvidia dGPUs. And if you don't really need a dGPU, then there's the Thinkpad T series with the Ryzen processor.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

afaik, if u use the proprietary nvidia drivers and the https://asus-linux.org kernel, u should be good to go. and also, according to this, fedora is the recommended distro of choice by the asus-linux team, but u should find guides for other distros that also support the asus-linux kernel on that website

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

This is really cool! I had no idea that asus had Linux support. I just skimmed their site, are all their current models supported?

I’ll have to consider them next time I get a computer.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I don't see why it won't play nice with linux but as to if you should buy this laptop... it doesn't look in a good shape. I am a bit biased as I had poor experience with laptops with gpus. Old laptops can have bent heatsinks so you can't control the temps no matter what. If yiu are hell bent on buying it then I'd recommend to stress test both gpu and cpu and look for heavy thermal throttling

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