I’ve found it varies from compositor to compositor:
Plasma? Mid on Nvidia
Constantly I have issues and I can’t even solve them myself
I have plasma working on Ubuntu Studio on a laptop I use for music making which has some Nvidia card, and that works fine, but not on my main Arch install
GNOME? Works okay until you want to do something with portals like screen recording
Even if I use a different portal, GNOME overrides it.
Hyprland? Works amazing EXCEPT for random tiny issues
Also I had to do a lot of tweaking
Every now and then some program will not start or something
But generally pretty good
Sway? Garbo support
Nvidia may not even boot. Lots of tweaking. Lots of issues
Cosmic? For wayland - solid
For everything else… it needs a little work still
I also tried Cosmic Shell + Niri, and it just kinda didn’t work in some ways like theming, but Wayland worked great.
Also performance with multi-displays is kinda poor, or at least it was when I tried it.
But Niri? Perfect
Absolutely FLAWLESS Wayland. EVERYTHING works
And now that I have DMS there’s so much done for me. It’s really a great system
Since I love the scrolling aspect of Niri as well, it works out well that it has the best Wayland support. 10/10 project. I love it
When I was on X11 still I was primarily an i3 user, and the transition to Hyprland and Niri has been generally positive
But yeah, I’ve worked with Nvidia on Linux for several years now on multiple machines. I’m finally throwing in the towel whenever I buy a new PC. AMD all the way. It’s just better on Linux, even on X11
I mean distro only matters in so much as it’s how you get software.
Arch or Arch-based distros (except Manjaro) are nice for Nvidia bc you’re always on the latest drivers and latest wine and latest Niri. Mainly bc you get bug fixes and new features early.
That’s what I use.
Fedora is like that too, but Fedora tends to organize the system in a non-standard way, so I don’t use it. Tried for a few months. Ran into weird issues where I ended up needing to just build kernel and nvidia myself bc the COPR and main repo options just… didn’t work.
Nix can do it too but you have to deal with the static, immutable nature of everything. I like the centralized config nature but some apps just don’t work immutably.
Ubuntu and Debian distros can do it, but you might have to tweak more since they’re more stable and may not have the latest driver which you may need.
So I mean, they can all be tweaked to get the software you need. I like Arch bc of the AUR, up-to-date software, extensive documentation, and standard design, but then the risk is every now and then it’s “too up-to-date” and you get a regression, and for some people that’s too big a problem, even if it rarely happens.
my old rtx 2080 worked perfectly for video capture on gnome wayland portals but had stutter on the desktop on both x and wayland. plasma actually ran better.
truth is you never know what you are gonna get with nvidia drivers.
Guilty as charged
So you are living in an illusion of choice, while your options are obviously determined by the big corpo that you relied on for getting that card
(Saying that, I got an NVIDIA card like a dumbass too)
…more like a gifted old laptop, but yeah.
So not your choice either XD
My 16G RTX-3080 Mobile works well with Niri
I’ve found it varies from compositor to compositor:
Since I love the scrolling aspect of Niri as well, it works out well that it has the best Wayland support. 10/10 project. I love it
When I was on X11 still I was primarily an i3 user, and the transition to Hyprland and Niri has been generally positive
But yeah, I’ve worked with Nvidia on Linux for several years now on multiple machines. I’m finally throwing in the towel whenever I buy a new PC. AMD all the way. It’s just better on Linux, even on X11
Maybe ill check niri next. Any good distro to test it with?
I mean distro only matters in so much as it’s how you get software.
Arch or Arch-based distros (except Manjaro) are nice for Nvidia bc you’re always on the latest drivers and latest wine and latest Niri. Mainly bc you get bug fixes and new features early.
That’s what I use.
Fedora is like that too, but Fedora tends to organize the system in a non-standard way, so I don’t use it. Tried for a few months. Ran into weird issues where I ended up needing to just build kernel and nvidia myself bc the COPR and main repo options just… didn’t work.
Nix can do it too but you have to deal with the static, immutable nature of everything. I like the centralized config nature but some apps just don’t work immutably.
Ubuntu and Debian distros can do it, but you might have to tweak more since they’re more stable and may not have the latest driver which you may need.
So I mean, they can all be tweaked to get the software you need. I like Arch bc of the AUR, up-to-date software, extensive documentation, and standard design, but then the risk is every now and then it’s “too up-to-date” and you get a regression, and for some people that’s too big a problem, even if it rarely happens.
CachyOS has it out of the box in their installer.
my old rtx 2080 worked perfectly for video capture on gnome wayland portals but had stutter on the desktop on both x and wayland. plasma actually ran better.
truth is you never know what you are gonna get with nvidia drivers.
Didn’t they straighten out Wayland support? I thought this was a thing of the past as of 555, but I also haven’t run Nvidia myself in years and years.
My work PC has a 3080 and the latest
nvidia-dkmsin the Arch repo. I haven’t had a single display-related issue for probably a year.With the same setup I had constant issues with Variable Refresh Rate, monitor sleep and actual sleep…
Nvidia on Linux did not want to work well for me
I had an NVIDIA card when I switched to Linux about two and a half years ago and I’ve never had an issue AFAIK.
NVidia on wayland is fine now. I’ve been running Fedora 43 for about a month on my gaming PC, even the boot splash works at native resolution
I was on 580 and had issues on CachyOS and Bazzite and Garuda Linux KDE Lite with an RTX 4080.