I’m planning on getting a laptop within the next month which will be my daily driver for university, and it has a RTX 5060. I know people have lots of issues with NVIDIA on Linux, but I don’t know of any specific issues. What issues can I expect running Fedora 42 (KDE) on this device?
I am not responding to most comments here, but I am silently taking them into account.
A lot of the info here reads as outdated to me, I have a 40 series card and on bazzite with open drivers it works with zero issues on major titles like Cyberpunk, Horizon, etc. The open drivers have come a long way. It took maybe 5 months post 40 series release for it to work 100% with no glaring issues for me, but 40 series was also the first cards to be launched with the open drivers so it makes sense there’d be hiccups
The only issues I’ve had on Wayland are color related.
Running RTX4050 mobile on Fedora 41 (internet too crappy to upgrade to 42)
Works great!
Except for unreal 5 games but idk if that’s a driver or a proton issue :/
I had a 3060 Ti.
I couldn’t game on Wayland for about 20% of my games (very frustrating), couldn’t use specific Window Managers like Sway, experience constant screen tearing on X11 (which I often had to use, because the game would crash on Wayland) when gaming, and had a significant performance hit in some games.
CS:GO ran like a dream and actually better than on Windows, but with the release of CS2 my performance on Linux was about 20% worse than on Windows. My 1% lows were also crazy on Linux (median=190fps, %1=80fps). This meant, among others things, that I just couldn’t play death match anymore — my FPS would make it unplayable. This was largely an optimization issue and I think some of the 2025 Nvidia driver updates of improved the situation a little for CS2 specifically. The screen tearing on X and the buggyness on Wayland were enough for me to switch though, even if eventual improvements might come.
I am now extremely happy with my 7900 XT, which I got for less than any available 9070 XT (in my region) and which amusingly actually has better performance in CS2 then then the 9070 XT on Linux. It’s massively overkill though, I could have just as well gotten a 7800 XT or 9070 (non-XT).
I am still very, very pleased. Hopefully this will last me a few years, unlike the gosh darn 3060 Ti.
Alright, I’m done with my huge block of text. Hopefully this was helpful.
I had to switch back to Windows for now since game performance was noticeably worse with my Nvidia card on Fedora vs Windows. Something running at around 130-144fps cutting down to 80-9fos as an example. So be prepared for that. From what I gather it’s unique to Nvidia.
Certain videos won’t play in any media player. Also occasional graphical glitches in Plasma for me. No issues with games oddly enough.
Edit: I’m using Arch but I’d expect these issues to be distro-agnostic. Though I’m fine with being wrong.
As long as the graphics isn’t that hybrid Nvidia Optimus or whatever the hell they call it, you’re good. That hybrid shit was a nightmare to get working, and it never worked right either.
When I used Fedora for a while with my 2070 I had literally no problems at all 🤷🏻♀️
You can expect your computer to function properly.
I have used both AMD and Nvidia cards on Linux for a long time and with Nvidia it’s mostly fine now days, but their driver situation tends to be fine until the rare time that it isn’t. I switched back to AMD last year due to the occasional driver issue that left me dead in the water. And by occasional I mean like once every year or so, not something common. It is entirely possible that you’ll never have much of an issue, but I started to take note of my Nvidia driver versions and and especially noted when GPU drivers were updated so that I had some notion of where to try to roll back to if I ran into issues. I haven’t had any issues like that with my AMD cards for a long, long time in Linux (with Windows obvious the situation was more of the reverse of this).
As long as you’re using modern drivers, such as 570 or later (preferably 575), your experience should generally be fine.
Nvidia rightfully earned their bad reputation on linux, but over the last year or two they’ve put a ton of work into improving it, specifically in wayland support.
One of the last major open issues is DX12 performance. DX12 performance is kinda all over the place depending on your hardware, game, and game settings, but you can generally expect around a 20% performance hit to DX12 games compared to windows. DX11, opengl, and vulkan games perform about as well as windows. Dx12 performance on Nvidia has been a known issue for years and Nvidia was silent on it, but just a few months ago they finally publically acknowledged it and claimed they were working on it. In my experience, Nvidia typically pretends problems don’t exist until they actually decide to fix them, so we can probably start expecting improvements to DX12 performance soon.
I’ve been exclusively gaming with Nvidia on linux (CachyOS) for about a year now and my experience has been satisfactory, so you should be fine.
Nvidia rightfully earned their bad reputation on linux,
Really? IMO not with GPUs. They have released linux drivers for decades, and always in time for new kernel versions. ATI was typically way behind and buggy as hell. I would likely not have switched to Linux on the desktop in 2006 if it wasn’t for my GPU “just working”, without any fiddling. Performance was always equal to Windows and stuff like multimonitoring just worked. They even had their nice setup utility to configure Xorg for you.
Could they have handled the transition to Wayland better? Maybe. But claiming they earned a bad reputation in regards to GPU when they are the one big vendor that had extremely active linux support for ages is dishonest and unwarranted, IMO.
Dishonest and unwarranted? What?
They dragged their feet on wayland and tried to force EGLStreams for years, causing a ton of work for open source devs. Their drivers on linux are still significantly more annoying to install than AMD or Intel and still use proprietary userspace drivers. This all and more is the definition of earning their bad reputation.
You know what’s dishonest and unwarranted? You trying to twist my words and imply I compared them to other manufacturers when I didn’t. More than one company can rightfully earn a bad reputation, and ATI definitely did as well. Nvidia was indeed better for a long while, and then earned their bad reputation over the later 2010s and early 2020s.
The Nvidia issue is overblown IMO. Yes, it used to be petty bad a couple of years ago with bugs and glitches all over the place, especially with Wayland. These days not so much. Just use the proprietary Nvidia drivers and you will have a solid experience. It’s honestly been over a year since I last had an issue that I could narrow down to Nvidia hardware.
Just make sure to read some reports from people with the same model of laptop. Laptops with very specific hardware can have compatibility issues.
I don’t know about that man. Installed Fedora 42 and GNOME to run with my RTX3080 and GNOME froze and crashed at random constantly. Installed KDE Plasma instead and it runs just fine.
I get what you’re saying but I don’t think it’s overblown having put up with issues myself with a mainstream 3070 card. A year really isn’t very long and it’s been a series of issues for me. When I’ve seen reports that the issues are fixed I have tried Wayland sessions and still find basic problems like video lag on my dual 4k set up without any clear solution. I have an Nvidia GPU and I avoid Wayland as a result.
My feeling is that they’ve fixed the issues perhaps for most useage cases but not all, and it can be enough for just 1 unfixed issue to ruin your experience.
I have a 3070 and am Linux only now; I’m currently looking at an upgrade for my GPU and genuinely I’m not even looking at an Nvidia GPU such have the annoyances been with Nvidia and wayland support. Many people who want specific features of Nvidia cards may not be so lucky
Even if Wayland support is fixed, I’m in the category of once bite twice shy with Nvidia on linux.
I definitely had issues with my 3070. I ran it in Linux for 4 years before recently switching back to AMD. It was usually only minor issues like it not playing well with certain DEs, but sometimes certain driver versions would make my system unusable/unbootable until I could roll them back. I am glad some people never had it happen, but pretending like it wasn’t a thing just makes you ignorant.
For gaming on Linux, use latest release (e.g. v575) of Nvidia driver. And for everything else stick to production release (e.g. v570).
Just use the newest driver and you’ll be completely fine. Even with very recent hardware, everything works as expected for me.
People like to shit on Nvidia, which is deserved for their business practices and relationship with Linux in the past, however most who claim that there are issues clearly haven’t used an Nvidia GPU under Linux in a long time.
It just works.
I had some weird issues with my 3080 Ti on Fedora 41 and 42 and have recently switched to a 9070 XT.
Most games ran fine, but other programs acted strange while games were open. Space Engineers, Escape from Tarkov, and a couple other titles wouldn’t allow me to use other programs. The cursor would stay the same as in-game, even when alt-tabbed, and the Discord UI would become unresponsive.
I had several strange issues with my monitor flickering that didn’t resolve until I uninstalled and reinstalled my drivers.
I had a horrible issue with Minecraft and other OpenGL games that caused a strobing white screen while playing. I forgot how I resolved that one.
I had to reinstall drivers several times. I don’t know how much of it was self-inflicted or just how it goes on Linux.
None of these issues have come up while on my 9070 XT.
Yeah I have a 3070 and have experienced similar sorts of minor annoyances when using Wayland. When I see reports that issues are fixed I try a Wayland session and still find various oddities or issues.
They may be marginal useages but for me I have a dual screen set up and I might game on one and have a video open on another, or even have two video streams open, one on each screen. I find videos slow down and lag, or have artefacts. Issues I don’t get on X11 or when I was in windows.
I’m in the same position of looking to upgrade my graphics card and I’m looking at AMD to avoid any more Nvidia related issues. I love using Linux but I don’t want to be dealing with Nvidia drivers after past experience.
Good specific experience to know, thanks. Basically the only game I do care about is Minecraft, so as long as I do get that working, I’ll be fine.
I use Prismlauncher, it’s great for managing multiple versions with different mod lists, Java versions, etc. Nice, clean interface, and you get a background cat!
I’ve been using Aurora which is an immutable distro based on Fedora. It’s from the same guys who do Bazzite. I use it on my work laptop with a discrete Nvidia card. I’ve had zero issues with the video driver. (I use Bazzite on two desktop and a laptop at home, all with Nvidia cards).
I really like these universal blue distro because on the odd occasion that I have an issue after an update, I can reboot into a pinned working version of the system. There are only a couple of CLI commands to learn to pin and unpin the different systems. All currently available systems appear on the grub menu. It’s kind of brilliant IMO.
Only downside is that installing RPM packages isn’t recommended, but I’ve found pretty much everything I need through flathub. I have one RPM package installed for VeraCrypt (no flatpak and it doesn’t work right in a container) but it hasn’t caused any issues for me.
Edit: I should say I can’t speak to the ongoing driver issues on the 50 series cards. The newest card I own is an RTX 3080 LHR 12 GB.
Yeah, can’t recommend Aurora enough. It’s awesome to have literally 0 driver issues, since the system image already contains the drivers pre-installed.
