"Experimental Nvidia support has been deprecated since its inception, and has now been removed entirely. Please use nouveau and consider future purchases from GPU vendors that support open source. Other proprietary drivers are also unsupported."
How is nouveau doing this days compared to the proprietary drivers of NVidia ?
The short of it is, every card has 2d support. There are very few lacking 3d acceleration. Newer cards have flimsy video acceleration. Power management is severely lacking across the board. Specific advanced features are hit or miss. Performance is still behind the proprietary driver in every case I've seen; but for cards from the 200 to 700 series, it's a smaller drop-off than newer cards.
I'd recommend giving it a try and see how it works in your specific use case. I've personally never found a case where nouveau works well enough to drop the Nvidia driver, but I'm usually on the latest or next to latest gen.
Sway/wlroots maintainer here. The older the card, the better the support. If you're not gaming and you have a 9xx or older card, you should have pretty decent support for a workstation type of deal. If you get as old as 7xx or 6xx you start to have games getting playable.
i think you will be happy to hear since 2014 they can alterr the clock speeds and get out of the boot frquency of the cards which gives them somewhat normal performance. there is a bit of an issue still to reverse features implemented on the cards. this is a daunting task. these features make some functions in games or renderers run much smoother than directly rendering them or using non-specific resources for them ,which is why on a lot of places there is still considerable performance loss compared to nvidias own drivers.
nvidia are a bunch of dicks who have no real reason to keep their specifications closed other than to (speculating) hide things they don't want you to see. patents and other things will still protect their IP / featuresets even if they open it.... intel/amd are where people should invest, especially people who are using alternate (non-windows) platforms, since nvidia will never open their sources, and amd/intel will never improve the way you want if you don't invest in their future!
Doesn't support GPU power management on the newer cards akin to 1080 Ti. Thus X will never start if you've got more than a single 4K monitor; I suppose neither would GPGPU work. But I don't think I've had any other issues.
BTW, I believe the reason it's not supported isn't because OS developers don't understand how it works - it's because Nvidia has never released the private keys associated with power management on the GPU. So the only thing Nvidia's got to do is to provide these keys to the open-source community. So it is a DRM issue.
Imagine a world where Gnome doesn't support any proprietary card drivers, where VLC can't read non open codecs, where libre office can't open doc* files...
Does that seems like a world where FOSS can be successful in ?
It's not great in terms of performance in games, but it's perfectly usable on the desktop. I've been using sway on nouveau full time for a couple of days now and have had no issues so far.
"Please use nouveau and consider future purchases from GPU vendors that support open source. Other proprietary drivers are also unsupported."
Uh... how about I just not use your software? I'm not going to replace a couple thousand dollars in GPUs, or even buy a new specific GPU just so I can use your software.
I know this is about sway, but I feel I can't pass up this opportunity to profess my undying love for i3. The learning curve is relatively minor for such a slim powerful system I'm truly amazed. I really can't thank the original author(s) enough.
RE: Sway, I'm glad they hit this milestone, I have a friend who is using it and he claims it's almost as good, (although he hasn't found a way to do -gaps yet..).
Last time I used Wayland/Sway I couldn't get decent font rendering. Has the situation improved?
Sway maintainer here, i3-gaps is fully supported. Can you direct your friend to our support channels? #sway on irc.freenode.net, or open a GitHub issue.
Font rendering on sway is in all respects equivalent to font rendering on i3.
i3 really is just incredible and simple - and not at all opinionated about what other components you use (statusbar, menu, notification system, screen locker, etc).
>Last time I used Wayland/Sway I couldn't get decent font rendering. Has the situation improved?
Wayland and Sway don't touch font rendering as far as I know. There should be no difference between font rendering on X and Wayland. Perhaps you were getting blurred out fonts due to scaling?
Sway is great -- for my purposes (which are mostly arranging terminal emulators) it's been indistinguishable from i3 for well over a year. Unfortunately some of the systems I use are burdened with Nvidia cards, which don't seem to work well with Wayland no matter which driver I use. (It's even worse with Gnome!) Anywhere I have AMD or Intel graphics, I use Sway very happily.
Congrats to the sway developers on this milestone. i3 is one of the 'killer apps' of the linux ecosystem and the developers of sway are doing god's work by translating i3 for the wayland compositor.
Excited to use this soon if it lands in Debian 10 Buster.
I am really looking forward to using Sway. I briefly tried the beta and it worked very nicely. However, one problem that prevents me from switching completely is that with 2x scaling, XWayland apps are scaled up from a lower DPI, resulting in very blurry rendering.
As far as I understand, this is a problem in XWayland and GNOME uses a hack to make XWayland applications render without scaling (since X11 Qt/Gtk+ applications use their own scaling). But it makes using Firefox et al. way more convenient to use.
Am I seeing this right? Third party screen capture? Practically the only reason I'm still on i3 instead of sway is sharing my screen (as I work from home and do a few video calls a week).
edit: spelling. I am apparently terrible at leaving comments from my phone.
My current setup is to run xmonad as my window manager within an otherwise normal Gnome session. Is there a way to do this with Sway, possibly with some other desktop environment if I had to?
No, this is not currently possible, but it's something we're working on. It requires buy-in from e.g. Gnome, which is hard to get. KDE is more amenable to this.
By the way, check out waymonad, it's based on the same wlroots library as sway:
I use i3 currently. I might remove the old nvidia card from my box and purge the nvidia drivers from my system. The Intel graphics will be good enough. I run Gentoo but I don't want my graphical stuff to be high maintenance. Can anyone comment on whether it's worth it to move to wayland/sway?
[+] [-] trulyrandom|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Majestic121|7 years ago|reply
How is nouveau doing this days compared to the proprietary drivers of NVidia ?
[+] [-] deaddodo|7 years ago|reply
The short of it is, every card has 2d support. There are very few lacking 3d acceleration. Newer cards have flimsy video acceleration. Power management is severely lacking across the board. Specific advanced features are hit or miss. Performance is still behind the proprietary driver in every case I've seen; but for cards from the 200 to 700 series, it's a smaller drop-off than newer cards.
I'd recommend giving it a try and see how it works in your specific use case. I've personally never found a case where nouveau works well enough to drop the Nvidia driver, but I'm usually on the latest or next to latest gen.
[1] - https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vectorEQ|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software) here is some interesting info on the state, with a lot of references
nvidia are a bunch of dicks who have no real reason to keep their specifications closed other than to (speculating) hide things they don't want you to see. patents and other things will still protect their IP / featuresets even if they open it.... intel/amd are where people should invest, especially people who are using alternate (non-windows) platforms, since nvidia will never open their sources, and amd/intel will never improve the way you want if you don't invest in their future!
[+] [-] heavenlyblue|7 years ago|reply
BTW, I believe the reason it's not supported isn't because OS developers don't understand how it works - it's because Nvidia has never released the private keys associated with power management on the GPU. So the only thing Nvidia's got to do is to provide these keys to the open-source community. So it is a DRM issue.
[+] [-] sametmax|7 years ago|reply
Does that seems like a world where FOSS can be successful in ?
[+] [-] brokencube|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rusticpenn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trulyrandom|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ratsimihah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cacti|7 years ago|reply
Uh... how about I just not use your software? I'm not going to replace a couple thousand dollars in GPUs, or even buy a new specific GPU just so I can use your software.
[+] [-] dijit|7 years ago|reply
RE: Sway, I'm glad they hit this milestone, I have a friend who is using it and he claims it's almost as good, (although he hasn't found a way to do -gaps yet..).
Last time I used Wayland/Sway I couldn't get decent font rendering. Has the situation improved?
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|7 years ago|reply
Font rendering on sway is in all respects equivalent to font rendering on i3.
[+] [-] lscotte|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trulyrandom|7 years ago|reply
Wayland and Sway don't touch font rendering as far as I know. There should be no difference between font rendering on X and Wayland. Perhaps you were getting blurred out fonts due to scaling?
[+] [-] sevensor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clircle|7 years ago|reply
Excited to use this soon if it lands in Debian 10 Buster.
[+] [-] microtonal|7 years ago|reply
As far as I understand, this is a problem in XWayland and GNOME uses a hack to make XWayland applications render without scaling (since X11 Qt/Gtk+ applications use their own scaling). But it makes using Firefox et al. way more convenient to use.
[+] [-] naibafo|7 years ago|reply
Though there is a wayland version of firefox, which I plan on trying out.
[+] [-] zdragnar|7 years ago|reply
edit: spelling. I am apparently terrible at leaving comments from my phone.
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|7 years ago|reply
By the way, check out waymonad, it's based on the same wlroots library as sway:
https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] red-tea|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|7 years ago|reply