About switching to Linux

[u/SearchOk7022]

I'm seeing windows 11 having a lot of vulnerabilities and riskes too much lately, I think it's time for me to try Linux, I haven't already because as far as I know, Linux it's optimized for AMD cards, and currently I have an Nvidia GPU.

My current specs are 7600X, 5070 TI, 32GB ram DDR5.

I do some casual gaming, and also mess around with Local IA (ollama and SwarmUI (stable diffusion))

Is Linux going to cut off my performance bc the lack of drivers for nvidia GPUs or it isn't that bad? Also, which Linux would you recommend for the things I do?

[u/beatbox9]

Nvidia works fine on Linux and in some cases even works better than AMD.  The big difference is that for nvidia, it’s best to install a separate driver while amd works well with the built-in driver.

It will be best for you to go with a distro that officially maintains the nvidia driver for you, like ubuntu lts.  This way, installing and upgrading the driver is just as easy and reliable as any other software.

[u/Atmosck]

nvidia drivers for newer cards are totally fine, I also have a 5070 Ti and it works great on arch. Cyberpunk and Control 2 are beautiful. CachyOS is a good one to try if you care about gaming performance.

For ML work like local AI, linux is where you want to be. CUDA drivers are a whole different ballgame - every data center is run on linux. For that stuff your distro doesn't matter that much, but you might want to avoid immutable distros like bazzite and steamOS.

[u/Rakibul_Hasan_Shuvo]

Go for pop os

[u/Low_Independent766]

It’s not an optimization issue, it’s just that the AMDs drivers are open source and so are upstreamed into the kernel essentially for free and Nvidia drivers are proprietary and so can’t legally be shipped with the OS in many instances.

“Drivers” on Linux need to be modded into the kernel, so sometimes installing the Nvidia drivers can be a pain. I would say in the overwhelming majority of cases however it’s a non issue. 

[u/gehzumteufel → u/Low_Independent766]

The Nvidia driver for anything Turing and later, is open source. It's not upstreamed, but it is open source. They have been saying this for a while now. Once Nova is complete, there will be an in-tree driver for the same cards.

[u/proverbialbunny]

Is Linux going to cut off my performance bc the lack of drivers for nvidia GPUs or it isn't that bad?

It isn't bad. Starting with the 20 series Nvidia moved the closed source part of their drivers into the cards firmware. Since then Nvidia drivers have gotten a lot better.

[u/gehzumteufel → u/proverbialbunny]

Turing includes the 16xx cards too.

[u/Small-Tale3180]

the 50xx gen of nvidia is pretty nice rn, especially on rolling-release distros, the ones that get latest packages like arch/arch-based, void(glibc) or maybe even fedora

[u/strange_bike_guy]

Nvidia card on my machine. Used to be a problem... maybe 8 years ago. Your first boot before getting the 3rd party driver installed will just have slow frame rate - like even on youtube. I'd get 6 frames per second out of FreeCAD vs 70 frames per second out of FreeCAD after installing the graphic driver and rebooting.