If you want to use Linux, please choose AMD. I helped install CachyOS on my sister’s RTX 5080 system and its horrible. 40% performance loss. She’s going back to Windows.

Edit: Not entirely accurate

Two pretty massive facts for anybody trying to answer this question:

1. Since driver version 555, explicit sync has been supported. This makes a massive difference to the experience on Wayland. Most of the problems people report are for drivers earlier than this (eg. black screens and flicker).

2. Since driver version 580, NVIDIA uses Open Source modules to interact with the kernel. These are not Open Source drivers. They are the proprietary drivers from NVIDIA that should now “just work” across kernel upgrades (like AMD has forever). This solves perhaps the biggest hassle of dealing with NVIDIA on Linux.

Whether you get to enjoy these significant improvements depends on how long it takes stuff to make it to your distribution. If you are on Arch, you have this stuff today. If you are on Debian, you are still waiting (even on Debian 13).

This is not an endorsement of either distro. They are simply examples of the two extremes regarding how current the software versions are in those distros. Most other distros fall somewhere in the middle.

All this stuff will make it to all Linux users eventually. They are solved problems. Just not solved for everyone.

I feel like most people who use Nvidia on Linux just got their machine before they were Linux users, with a small subset for ML stuff.

Honestly, I hear ROCm may finally be getting less horrible, is getting wider distro support, and supports more GPUs than it used to, so I really hope AMD will become as livable ML dev platform as it is a desktop GPU.

yes, HDMI 2.1. if you use a tv as a monitor, you won’t get 4k120 with amd cards on linux because hdmi forum is assholes

I’d say in general, the advantages of Nvidia cards are fairly niche even on windows. Like, multi frame generation (fake frames) and upscaling are kind of questionable in terms of value add most of the time, and most people probably aren’t going to be doing any ML stuff on their computer.

AMD in general offers better performance for the money, and that’s doubly so with Nvidia’s lackluster Linux support. AMD has put the work in to get their hardware running well on Linux, both in terms of work from their own team and being collaborative with the open source community.

I can see why some people would choose Nvidia cards, but I think, even on windows, a lot of people who buy them probably would have been better off with AMD. And outside of some fringe edge cases, there is no good reason to choose them when building or buying a computer you intend to mainly run Linux on.

I use AMD, where ever it is possible. Simply because they support Linux. There’s really no other reason needed. I don’t care about CUDA or anything else, that is vaguely not relevant. I’d rather drive a medium car, that gives me freedom, than a high end car, that ties me down.

Im putting together my new Nvidia PC build tonight. I was planning on putting bazzite on it, should I just use windows then?