this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
81 points (87.9% liked)

Linux

47737 readers
885 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
  • Price: 370$
  • Model: Asus ROG Strix G15 (G531GV)
  • CPU: Intel I7 9th Gen
  • GPU: Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB
  • Ram: 16GB
  • Storage: Samsung SSD 980 Pro 1TB (NVME)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 25 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

Sorry but could you please elaborate. I've been using nvidia forever in linux machines both at work and at home. I work in AI so using nvidia gpus is a must. Maybe there's something that I missed but my experience has been pretty solid so far.

At home I am using openSUSE tumbleweed KDE wayland and at work ubuntu headless.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

These days ROCm support is more common than a few years ago so you're no longer entirely dependent on CUDA for machine learning. (Although I wish fewer tools required non-CUDA users to manually install Torch in their venv because the auto-installer assumes CUDA. At least take a parameter or something if you don't want to implement autodetection.)

Nvidia's Linux drivers generally are a bit behind AMD's; e.g. driver versions before 555 tended not to play well with Wayland.

Also, Nvidia's drivers tend not to give any meaningful information in case of a problem. There's typically just an error code for "the driver has crashed", no matter what reason it crashed for.

Personal anecdote for the last one: I had a wonky 4080 and tracing the problem to the card took months because the log (both on Linux and Windows) didn't contain error information beyond "something bad happened" and the behavior had dozens of possible causes, ranging from "the 4080 is unstable if you use XMP on some mainboards" over "some BIOS setting might need to be changed" and "sometimes the card doesn't like a specific CPU/PSU/RAM/mainboard" to "it's a manufacturing defect".

Sure, manufacturing defects can happen to anyone; I can't fault Nvidia for that. But the combination of useless logs and 4000-series cards having so many things they can possibly (but rarely) get hung up on made error diagnosis incredibly painful. I finally just bought a 7900 XTX instead. It's slower but I like the driver better.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

Finally, thanks for the clear cut answer. I don't have any experience with training on AMD but the errors from nvidia are usually very obscure.

As for using gpus other than nvidia, there's a slew of problems. Mostly that on cloud where most of the projects are deployed, our options seem either limited to nvidia gpus, or cloud tpus.

Each AI experiment can cost usually in thousands of dollars and use a cluster of GPUs. We have built and modified our system for fully utilizing such an environment. I can’t even imagine shifting to Amd gpus at this point. The amount of work involved and the red tape shudder

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

Oh yeah, the equation completely changes for the cloud. I'm only familiar with local usage where you can't easily scale out of your resource constraints (and into budgetary ones). It's certainly easier to pivot to a different vendor/ecosystem locally.

By the way, AMD does have one additional edge locally: They tend to put more RAM into consumer GPUs at a comparable price point – for example, the 7900 XTX competes with the 4080 on price but has as much memory as a 4090. In systems with one or few GPUs (like a hobbyist mixed-use machine) those few extra gigabytes can make a real difference. Of course this leads to a trade-off between Nvidia's superior speed and AMD's superior capacity.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

My experience (and many others') has been contradictory to yours. AMD, on the other hand, pretty much always works without any fuss because they release first-party open source drivers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

Do you mean in terms of gaming? I admit that I don't do much gaming on linux. Usually just development and browsing.

I also use proprietary nvidia drivers if that makes a difference.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

No.

E: why am I being downvoted for answering a question?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, Tumbleweed has a good track record with NVIDIA drivers in my experience. As with updates in general.

Although I still use X11 as Wayland still has graphical issues in some apps for me. Usually Flatpaks. That makes it unusable for me for the time being.

Edit: I have an older card (1050ti), so maybe I don't get the latests drivers anymore?? On version 550.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Ah the problem you are describing in wayland actually usually happens only with electron apps. Most of the electron apps require forcing them to run on wayland. They are usually running on X (x-wayland) which cause all sorts of glitches. You can use xeyes to check if the app is using xwayland or not. If eyes move when you move the cursor inside the app then it's on xwayland.

To resolve the issues for the electron apps I pass these parameters: --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland

Getting these args to flatpacks could be a bit tricky. You can usually find Appimages that can allow you to run these apps easily on wayland.

I am also on ver 550.120 so doubt that driver is the issue here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

The only two things that have ever been broken by an update for me are hyprland and Nvidia drivers, multiple times

Even then that seems to have stopped happening recently though they patched one of the reallg big issues this year