Apologies. I have a 3090 in my old system which I run headless in a closet as a dedicated AI LLM/image generator. When buying a new system, I listened to all the “Nvidia sucks, AMD just works!” hype, and opted for a 7900XTX. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement, and I sincerely wished I had not listened to the Linux community at large.
But yes, ESO/Neverwinter/Solasta and the few other RPG’s I play under Proton/Steam work well and rarely crash.
Ah yeah - booting off a rescue USB and downgrading the kernel plus going through DKMS on a live system (perhaps a chroot, I’m not sure what the procedure would be). That’s what I consider smooth sailing and no shenanigans!
Compared to what you documented in your blog? Not to mention the rescue CD is if DKMS fails, your steps are just to get it working.
No need to apoligise! I get that you’re frustrated and why. AMD is really not (yet?) anywhere close to Nvidia for AI (or Ray Tracing!).
Compared to what you documented in your blog?
Yes. What I documented on the blog is a few commands once in a lifetime, from the comfort of your GUI, with the browser running where you can copy-paste from directly into the terminal emulator. I do consider that a lot less faff than booting off a live USB and figuring out how to compile a driver that DKMS failed to do automatically, then make sure it will work when I boot from my actual system.
Not to mention the rescue CD is if DKMS fails, your steps are just to get it working.
Not quite. The system works fine without that. In fact, I played a few games with no issues whatsoever before I figured out there were firmware files missing. In fact, the only thing that tipped me to thag were errors in dmesg which I only looked because I’m a stickler for that kind of stuff and decided to poke and prod as many logs as I could when I was building the system.
Also like I mentioned, this is only necessary because Debian haven’t packaged those files yet. Many distros have them out of the box.
In any case, I know that plenty of people run Nvidia on Linux and face no issues. I have no interest in AI stuff on my Linux box and I have no love lost for Nvidia. That, coupled with AMD having been historically a lot friendlier to Linux than Nvidia, plus the fact that the drivers compile and ship with the kernel, made my purchase decision pretty easy. To each their own though, and clearly for your needs Nvidia is the way to go.
So going back to the start of the conversation, neither GPU is completely shenanigans free. Both require research, documentation, and additional work. Linux has a learning curve.
Does AMD ‘work out of the box’? Sort of, but it really depends on the card and distribution. I know with Arch for example, things like scrolling in Youtube were horrendously laggy and I spent a few hours trying to install missing packages trying to figure out what was wrong. I haven’t tried any other distros with an AMD card, but I’ve run PopOS, Ubuntu, and Arch on Nvidia without significant issues (other than modifying the kernel cmdline), but let’s be honest that’s less work than setting up almost anything else you’re going to run on Linux.
Booting off a USB is also incredibly easy, and it’s probably something everyone should have some experience with. Less than 3 hours after a fresh install I accidentally removed my user from the wheel group and lost sudo privileges …
Apologies. I have a 3090 in my old system which I run headless in a closet as a dedicated AI LLM/image generator. When buying a new system, I listened to all the “Nvidia sucks, AMD just works!” hype, and opted for a 7900XTX. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement, and I sincerely wished I had not listened to the Linux community at large.
But yes, ESO/Neverwinter/Solasta and the few other RPG’s I play under Proton/Steam work well and rarely crash.
Compared to what you documented in your blog? Not to mention the rescue CD is if DKMS fails, your steps are just to get it working.
No need to apoligise! I get that you’re frustrated and why. AMD is really not (yet?) anywhere close to Nvidia for AI (or Ray Tracing!).
Yes. What I documented on the blog is a few commands once in a lifetime, from the comfort of your GUI, with the browser running where you can copy-paste from directly into the terminal emulator. I do consider that a lot less faff than booting off a live USB and figuring out how to compile a driver that DKMS failed to do automatically, then make sure it will work when I boot from my actual system.
Not quite. The system works fine without that. In fact, I played a few games with no issues whatsoever before I figured out there were firmware files missing. In fact, the only thing that tipped me to thag were errors in
dmesgwhich I only looked because I’m a stickler for that kind of stuff and decided to poke and prod as many logs as I could when I was building the system.Also like I mentioned, this is only necessary because Debian haven’t packaged those files yet. Many distros have them out of the box.
In any case, I know that plenty of people run Nvidia on Linux and face no issues. I have no interest in AI stuff on my Linux box and I have no love lost for Nvidia. That, coupled with AMD having been historically a lot friendlier to Linux than Nvidia, plus the fact that the drivers compile and ship with the kernel, made my purchase decision pretty easy. To each their own though, and clearly for your needs Nvidia is the way to go.
So going back to the start of the conversation, neither GPU is completely shenanigans free. Both require research, documentation, and additional work. Linux has a learning curve.
Does AMD ‘work out of the box’? Sort of, but it really depends on the card and distribution. I know with Arch for example, things like scrolling in Youtube were horrendously laggy and I spent a few hours trying to install missing packages trying to figure out what was wrong. I haven’t tried any other distros with an AMD card, but I’ve run PopOS, Ubuntu, and Arch on Nvidia without significant issues (other than modifying the kernel cmdline), but let’s be honest that’s less work than setting up almost anything else you’re going to run on Linux.
Booting off a USB is also incredibly easy, and it’s probably something everyone should have some experience with. Less than 3 hours after a fresh install I accidentally removed my user from the
wheelgroup and lost sudo privileges …