[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch They have been neglecting the Linux side of drivers for years. They are starting to put more resources in there now, but it feels a bit too little and too late.

AMD made their Linux drivers open source, which fixed the problem of the AMD driver team being significantly smaller than NVIDIA's. With open source they get the benefit of other contributors finding potential bugs and solutions to them. Linux community in general is very pro open source and not enthusiastic about proprietary software.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka I guess NVIDIA may be a bit more protective of their intellectual property? That's the only explanation that comes to mind for me, but I am not well-versed in the inner workings of companies like that.

But your point is valid: even in games, those developers open doors to modders and in some cases give them tools to make mods have a better overall experience than those who guard their code and make it difficult to change (speaking very broadly, of course).

Then again, Bethesda is known for doing that but to the point where it sometimes almost delegates the final bug fixing to modders. Which is not good. How polished are NVIDIA drivers usually?

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch That they are, but with them also refusing to acknowledge Linux being crucial for professionals, there has been a lot of bad air regarding this situation. They have not officially said so, but there was a perceivable attitude of "who cares about Linux anyway".

The drivers don't have the dedicated fixes per game like the Windows ones. Well, not like the AMD ones do. The fixes for rendering in games can be done differently, so that isn't a big problem. Even on Windows there are sometimes third party fixes for games; pretty much every new release had some gamebreaking issues and some tools were out there to help. On Linux these are Very Much A Thing as a baseline; it's called Proton. Valve is really putting a lot of effort to make Linux gaming possible - and often you can actually get better performance than on a Windows system.

Regarding the driver issues, my most common problems are that the switchable graphics get borked. It can happen on a desktop computer too despite the graphics being not so switchable, and trust me, trying to run games on an old Intel iGPU is no fun. Solving the issue when it happens is a real pain in the ass, you have to do some workarounds to force the correct graphics to work. Another thing is that these drivers can sometimes break the system entirely when updating due to some dependency conflicts or other compatibility issues. Yes, it can happen with the other GPU makers too, but the open source drivers get a lot better testing and quicker fixes.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Could it be that they do not see "IT professionals who are gamers" as a promising market segment? Odd if so, I'd say many of them are. If I am following it right, mostly people who professionally use Linux but also want to use their devices for gaming and more advanced tasks are affected? I wonder if there are any studies into how many are there people like that, it could be that developers do not realise how big of a segment it is. Or, maybe they do but can't address it for various reasons.

Or maybe there is no reason and it just is what it is because that's how it was always done...

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Oh, the GPUs can be also used for professional means. The datacenter GPUs are very expensive compared to the desktop ones. So there's a lot of people using "gaming" cards for compute. Those might not find out about games stubbornly not launching with the correct renderer, but would be affected by system randomly bricking with an update. Then again those people usually have the option of sticking to LTS versions of distributions. In these versions the drivers and other software would be thoroughly checked for potential issues before being pushed to the repository.

But indeed, it's a much smaller market than gamers using Windows OS.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka It is still worth it to talk about it and make those issues heard. Not sure if there are enough people with these specific requirements to make a niche in the market, but even if not, some sort of accessible workaround could be something that someone could come up with.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Just a couple of days ago I was browsing Reddit while taking a break from coding and stumbled upon this. To be fair, that a lot of the pain of that user was self-inflicted. A rookie should never choose Arch as one of their first distros. It's an extremely DIY version of Linux. And just because he wanted a different desktop shell? C'mon, you can change the shell without a full OS reinstall.

But it shows the driver issues are a widespread problem and they are even a marketing point for the PoP OS! distro. It comes with those drivers preinstalled, so that *most of the time* there are no issues.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Could it be then that the devs think "PoP OS! distro is on it" and do not think about it too much themselves? If someone taps a market niche, it becomes easy to ignore.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch It's one of many distributions, so if that were the reasoning, it would not be a good one. I don't know to be fair.