Video card recommendation for Linux (wayland)

Hello,

I currently have an aged nvidia 550ti, the open source drivers work horrible, I get random total freezes, that require hard reset, and the nvidia proprietary drivers don't work with GDM3.

I am building a new Ryzen machine.

Any idea how newer nvidia cards work? From what I read they don't play nice and don't work well with Wayland because nvidia refuses to implement required support. I was thinking on getting something like the 1060.

Any idea on how the amd RX 480 works in linux? does it work on wayland? I can't seem to find information about this :( with open or closed drivers?

Thanks
Luis

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Nvidia and wayland currently works together, but you have to force it a little bit.

Gnome 3.24 is shipping the end of this month, and Nvidia should play with wayland out of the box so you are good on that front.

The 1060 is a solid card, and I would probably go with it over a 480. However I would also look at a 1050ti. Its not that much slower, and it is cheaper, quieter, and puts out less heat.

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any old nvidia card'll do, any old AMD card'll do too, as long as you don't need it for heavy acceleration or gaming.

Actually I think only the 900 and 1000 series gpus will be getting wayland support.

I think the older gpus will see an update later on, but I am not sure. The whole nividia wayland thing is really weird.

which is why you should be using X

Wayland and mir are solutions to a problem that wasn't really there to begin with

wtf?

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Any Intel or AMD GPU will work just fine with Wayland. X11 works, but it's a miracle that it works, Wayland is definitely the future, Mir is deaborn. X11 is not suitable and way too big to allow for modern evolutions. X11 is really really old and has so much patches and fixes that it qualifies as a work of art more than as a software project at this point. Just stay away from nVidia, it's spyware under Windows and doesn't work well in linux, and if you use the windows drivers in linux (aka the proprietary driver), you're basically making your entire system extremely vulnerable, because in order for the proprietary nVidia driver to work, the MAC7RBAC has to be disabled, and closed source code has to be compiled into your kernel.

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The RX 480 works perfectly in Linux, out of the box support and works with almost every Linux game. I say almost because some distros don't have opengl 4.3 enabled by default yet (thought it's in there ready to go). This is with the open drivers. There's literally nothing to do, it's plug and play.

I'd advise against older amd cards as you may or may not have good support or may have to screw around with proprietary drivers.

Nvidis cards will work alright as well but have to use the proprietary drivers. I think they almost have Wayland support if not have just got Wayland support.

However I overwhelming recommend the 480 with something like Fedora, openSUSE tumbleweed or similar.

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I second the 480. In any distro that has 4.9 kernel and above the open stack for AMD should work just fine out of the box. You can also make sure you install the latest MESA drivers that really provide good performance in any aspect.

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RX480

All there is to say.

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46 posts were split to a new topic: Linux + Nvidia Security Discussion (because thread derailing is not fun)

Wayland is a failure for what linux should be. Here is a quote from the SSR developer.

I've had long discussions with the Wayland developers years ago about implementing screen capturing, global hotkeys, absolute positioning and other protocol features which they are still lacking. They aren't particularly enthusiastic about the idea, and the discussions got nowhere. They seem to feel that applications shouldn't actually need any of these features, therefore these features should not be used, and therefore implementing them is a bad idea. Someone has tried before to submit patches that allow absolute positioning - they got rejected. I'm pretty sure that the same thing would happen if I tried to submit patches that would allow screen capturing. The developers simply don't want these features.

So for people who want to use linux on the desktop with a specific use case (myself included), the wayland devs basically said "fuck that and fuck you".

By not doing shit like that.

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X11 is stable but chaotic and old. It has issue with remote connectivity and modern graphics features and includes a good amount of spaghetti code. It is saturated technology. This has been widely accepted on the developer community that Linux needs to move on from X11. X11 is a problem, there just was never an agreement on what should replace it. that quote from the developer is just part of that and of course the process of correcting it.

The only reason Wayland has taken that long is that none took the risk of making the jump before the new environment was stable enough to be worth it. It is too critical to risk it until proven stable enough even for testing on field.

This is just one discussion years ago about priorities not support. It does not really say anything on the grand scheme of things or anything on the future features on Wayland. You are reading to much on that.

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From what I read, compositors need a different codepath for NVidia... since they wanted to expose the memory access their way for some reason.

1) Wayland, disables cross app hooks, (like winhooks in windows), enabling a BIT more security, they don't give you access to the memory framebuffer at an app level (reason why many screen recorders are failing).
2) It syncs with the monitor to allow for tear free image.
3) supposed to be friendlier for non square windows allowing, X11 has too meny hacks to allow this among other hacks to allow other things. it was not designed to do some of the things it currently does. it currently heavily breajs the X protocol as soon as an app requires the use of an extension.
4) Wayland allows for per app DPI scaling, this will heavily improve DPI scaling in Linux. no more xrandr hacks.
........ should I go on?

I know is far from ready, but I want to try it :)

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RX480. Hell do two and use the other as a compute chip.

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@tkoham @Zoltan y'all can argue in my thread if you want. I don't care.

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seeing as x11 is still installed, can't you just switch to it when you need to record your screen?
Bit of a hassle but wayland just landed in DE a few months ago, it's not fair to expect a x11 replacement to work just like it when it just got released.

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my point in that thread was if wayland is the future, how come the devs were so apathetic to wanting to include functionality for a use case they didn't agree with. Leading people to still have to use the old methods, because the overwhelming majority of current software does not support the new wayland way.

You have the choice. If you want the latest and greatest, part of the deal is that you try out newer code while it is still being developed. If you don't want that, you stick to the old code. That system works pretty well in open source. It is that system, plus the enormous amounts of manpower such a system provides for development, that makes the open source quality so high.