I’m planning on getting a laptop within the next month which will be my daily driver for university, and it has a RTX 5060. I know people have lots of issues with NVIDIA on Linux, but I don’t know of any specific issues. What issues can I expect running Fedora 42 (KDE) on this device?
I am not responding to most comments here, but I am silently taking them into account.
As long as you’re using modern drivers, such as 570 or later (preferably 575), your experience should generally be fine.
Nvidia rightfully earned their bad reputation on linux, but over the last year or two they’ve put a ton of work into improving it, specifically in wayland support.
One of the last major open issues is DX12 performance. DX12 performance is kinda all over the place depending on your hardware, game, and game settings, but you can generally expect around a 20% performance hit to DX12 games compared to windows. DX11, opengl, and vulkan games perform about as well as windows. Dx12 performance on Nvidia has been a known issue for years and Nvidia was silent on it, but just a few months ago they finally publically acknowledged it and claimed they were working on it. In my experience, Nvidia typically pretends problems don’t exist until they actually decide to fix them, so we can probably start expecting improvements to DX12 performance soon.
I’ve been exclusively gaming with Nvidia on linux (CachyOS) for about a year now and my experience has been satisfactory, so you should be fine.
Really? IMO not with GPUs. They have released linux drivers for decades, and always in time for new kernel versions. ATI was typically way behind and buggy as hell. I would likely not have switched to Linux on the desktop in 2006 if it wasn’t for my GPU “just working”, without any fiddling. Performance was always equal to Windows and stuff like multimonitoring just worked. They even had their nice setup utility to configure Xorg for you.
Could they have handled the transition to Wayland better? Maybe. But claiming they earned a bad reputation in regards to GPU when they are the one big vendor that had extremely active linux support for ages is dishonest and unwarranted, IMO.
Dishonest and unwarranted? What?
They dragged their feet on wayland and tried to force EGLStreams for years, causing a ton of work for open source devs. Their drivers on linux are still significantly more annoying to install than AMD or Intel and still use proprietary userspace drivers. This all and more is the definition of earning their bad reputation.
You know what’s dishonest and unwarranted? You trying to twist my words and imply I compared them to other manufacturers when I didn’t. More than one company can rightfully earn a bad reputation, and ATI definitely did as well. Nvidia was indeed better for a long while, and then earned their bad reputation over the later 2010s and early 2020s.