Finally NVidia open source - but too late for me

#1

I just ordered a Radeon XFX … 6600 XT with 8 GB VRam (to replace an NVidia GTX1650 Super).

Then I read this about uninstalling the proprietary drivers on Fedora 30-36 :

Looks WAY WAY WAY too hard… I can remember some shit like that when I did Linux desktop support - on RHEL 3 workstations for an oil exploration company (speccy machines, 64 bit Dual [physical] Operons with 16 or 32 gigs of DDR2 and 1 GB Vram NVidia Quadro GPUs (2007)…

In my workflow - easier and more likely chance of success is to install Fedora 36 from scratch on the new hardware…

Or I might just switch back to Ubuntu… 22.04… ???

My Linux (and Mac) hard drives don’t host any of my data (they merely cache sync’d copies from elsewhere). The longest bit is getting back 300+ Gb of game files from Steam…

#2

But does the open source driver support all the NVIDIA features the official driver provides?

#3

dunno - don’t care… too little too late… spending the most I’ve ever spent on a GPU …

In real terms, maybe less than my first x86 PC? I think the 512K Paradise labs ISA GPU in my 80286 AT system was the most expensive component on that $2200 piece of shit MS DOS PC I bought in 1991…

#4

I can remember CSIRO spending $9000 on 1Mb of ram. It came on a board about 12 inches square, with rows of soldered memory chips.
It was for an image processing setup… We had 3 Mb and we needed 1 more Mb to do things. Sometime in early 1980’s

That uninstall doesnt look all that difficult.

#5

Here’s what I’m going to try :

power off Fedora system…

Remove PCIe NVidia card…
Install new PCIe AMD / Radeon card…

Power up…

If it shits itself, I’ll go back to Ubuntu, where I’m more comfortable anyway… that’s still on the cards anyway - still hovering, teetering, on the fence, to go back to Ubuntu…

I fully expect Fedora to shit itself… I’m backing up my Steam library to a USB 3 SSD…

Just been using Inkscape as a SNAP in Fedora - it’s f–king horrible and ugly, e.g. file dialog boxes treat the fake SNAP filesystem as their home … e.g. the default location for export PNG is ALWAYS :

$HOME/snap/inkscape/

I want to use Inkscape as a proper app… I think the way that Ubuntu does stuff, even when they’re foisting snapd solutions on their “customers”, is slightly more “polished” than Fedora… Yeah - I think I crashed Inkscape on Ubuntu 22.04 as a VM (gnome boxes) - but just tried it again now - confirmed okay, and didn’t crash - seems way more “polished” on Ubuntu, than running it as a SNAP on Fedora, which feels half arsed and unfinished…

I will probably continue to run Fedora (now 36) on my Ryzen 5 Thinkpad… I’m in the very fortunate position of having multiple devices and I can distrohop at my leisure, and never really have to worry too much about my data files, my media files, and the headf–k of partitioning schemes and dual booting (god forbid!).

#6

If you change the hardware, I dont think the power up will load a driver for the new board. My understanding is it only hardware probes and adds drivers during an install? Ther may be some generic driver that it can use just to make the screen work at low res.
So you should prepare for it by adding the required new drivers, before you power off and change the board.

Alternatively redo the install after changing card.

Agree on inkscape. You want a normal installed package. And not just inkscape, for everything.

#7

With ubuntu 14 - I swapped a 256 GB SATA SSD (with Ubuntu 14 installed) out of a Dell laptop into my Linux gaming desktop, then setup Ubuntu for my NVidia GPU… After a few months - I had to put the SSD back into the Dell laptop, and it didn’t skip a beat…

Fingers crossed - but - I’m probably going to format and re-install Ubuntu 22.04 from scratch anyway…

#8

Because the drivers are the same in both machines.

#9

No they’re not…
The AMD gaming system was a desktop system with a NVidia GTX650Ti card running proprietary drivers
The Intel i7 Dell laptp, was a laptop system using Intel GPU drivers…
Note - I’m in two minds now - over the tiniest little thing - Ubuntu 22.04 with Gnome 42, does not have a proper dark mode for “EVERYTHING”, and by everything, I mean including VLC. On Fedora 35 (Gnome 41.6) and 36 (Gnome 42) - VLC runs in dark mode… Damn…

I’m going to update my Fedora 36 system, and try out Inkscape from the repos (VS SNAP).

#10

So both sets of drivers must be present on that SSD install. There is nowhere else it could get them from… the install disk isnt there and it will not automatically download them

SNAP is full of bugs.

DARK MODE… You dont mean redshift? You mean setting a dark theme for windows? Yes that never seems to work consistently for me. Some apps do it, others ignore it and follow their own settings.
Evince and atril and okular are always white
The most functional dark theme is Budgie

#11

You ought to read the post ‘INKSCAPE installed isnt opening’.
The new reply by @FeRDNYC is very illuminating

#12

It wasn’t difficult - as it didn’t apply in my case… I hadn’t installed the NVidia supplied proprietary drivers as a *.run executable (how we used to install them on REL3 for that oil exploration company)…

Fedora has a thing called RPM Fusion, which I’d used to install the NVidia proprietary drivers…

This told me how to remove them and reset the default to nouveau :
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Uninstall_the_NVIDIA_driver

But then I had to do this again as well (disable Wayland - thanks to the useless SHITHEADS over at Symless :rage: ) :
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/configuring-xorg-as-default-gnome-session/

It’s all running swimmingly - about to shutdown and replace the NVidia GPU with an AMD Radeon GPU… Fingers crossed everything (i.e. my game library) just works out of the box with open source AMD GPU drivers… I may end up trying pro drivers, as my monitor has AMD Freesync, and I’d like to know what difference that makes…

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#13

@daniel.m.tripp
So the way to fix inkscape is

  1. Go back to a version of fedora, ubuntu or whatever that only uses python2, or
  2. Try blacklisting python3… I dont know what this might break?

I have an inkscape in Debian 11. Might try a few things

#14

Done, and done :

Screenshot from 2022-05-15 12-45-05

Now do upgrade my RAM to the fastest possible…

I should run GeekBench 5 again now…

#15

Congratulations.
Yes, fast ram and as much ram as your board supports

#16

I initially built this system “down” to a price in early 2021… I already had some 2133 4 GB DDR4 modules doing nothing, and I bought a pair of cheap 2133 16 GB DDR4 modules… to get me to 40 GB of RAM…

I should have just sat on 16 GB (4 x 4) and then upgraded now, now that “down to a cost” isn’t my priority…

So - to not go backwards from 40 GB of RAM - e.g. going to 64 (4 x 16 GB @ 3600 Mhz), will cost me about $500 AUD…

And I’m still unsure if I will notice the difference… I reckon I’ll wait a while…

But damn it - the monitors I’d settled on, of which I now have two on my desk, are no longer available anywhere in West Australia, and the only retailer (OfficeWorks) won’t let you buy them online…

Lenovo 32" 144 Hz curved gaming monitors… Having two curved, and one “straight” on my desk, which is a slow 60 hz, offends my sense of symmetry!

#17

try amazon, or lenovo direct

#18

Bloody Snaps hate them, as soon you’ll need a 4TB drive to run them on, same with Flatpaks. What is all the crap being downloaded in the background? Ubuntu is Debian based, then keep it bloody Debian is my take on it. Or at least support AppImages instead of turning Firefox into a Snap only Package? Tried 22.04 in a VM way before I saw any read up on Ubuntu 22.04 and still cannot believe that Firefox is Snap only. Yes it works takes a while first opening to display, but still don’t like it. Flatpaks are just as bad in my opinion. G-Radio which was a Deb file originally has now been rewritten and renamed to Short-Wave Flatpak only. 1.1GB to download and 2.5GB of installed space, what the hell?

Probably not, unless of course they are going to update everything to the 30 series of cards, as my 3060 does not like Nouveau drivers, though saying that I installed Zorin’s XFCE light edition based on 20.04.1 point release, which was not that light at 2.6GB download. Maybe they have some Gnome display settings trickery going on, in order for the Nouveau drivers to display 1440p out of the bag on the installation USB? Can only Speculate.

#19

In my experience, that nouveau driver does not like anything that is built after 2007 or whatever long time ago. If you have a card from before 2007, then you are probably safe. But my tests with any graphics card that is built from that time on was terrible. Always had to resort to the official driver, because it at least worked, even if it wasn’t always without a bit of trouble.

Over the years, I had too many bad experiences with nouveau. I don’t trust that driver anymore, at all. I wouldn’t ever recommend using it based on my experiences. It just never knows what to do and just breaks graphics card usage.

My “favourite” effect of nouveau is how it always made everything lag. The operating system is not running anything. Literally only the desktop environment is up and running. Still, everything lags on a well equipped machine.
Then, after switching to the official drivers, the lag is entirely gone. No problem with lags anymore, even when running heavy software. Thanks nouveau. This happened so many times already and it was by far not the only issue I experienced with this shoddy open source graphics card driver…

#20

Screen Tearing too is a pain with Nouveau. AMD Display Laptops work fine with it though, after adding tear free script and for Intel Laptops too. The back end is always Nouveau with AMD and Intel display chips, with a couple of packages of firmware for both too, but at the heart it’s still Nouveau. Weird how it works fine with AMD and Intel Display chips and yet a complete nightmare with NVIDIA?

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