I have had so many issues with Nvidia drivers, especially on laptops with Optimus. Black screens after booting, random breakage when updating, having to fuck around with OpenGL libraries all the time when you have integrated Intel graphics and Nvidia graphics on the same system. It's just a pain for me on laptops.

Wouldn't be such a big issue on a desktop, but I've had a work-provided workstation with an Nvidia and 99% of the time if something broke on that machine, it was because Nvidia wasn't compatible with some updated kernel or libraries.

Intel and AMD have both provided us with a painless driver experience that just works out of the box all the time and is integrated in all the open source things (mainly the Linux kernel and the Mesa libraries for OpenGL & Vulkan). With Nvidia, you need to throw all that out and use their proprietary blobs for OpenGL and Vulkan.

Also, I just think Nvidia is a scumbag company, trying to force single-vendor proprietary solutions on the market by abusing their dominant position (pushing CUDA while refusing to implement any new OpenCL version for over a decade, so software vendors couldn't just pick a competitive open alternative is one example, the original G-Sync is another). I prefer not to give them any money if I can help it.

I've been using Linux for over 20 years and I don't get it either. I don't know why a vocal minority get so fixated on it. It's not like it's the only manufacturer with proprietary drivers. As long as the drivers work and are easy to install I don't see a problem.

I've used ATI/AMD cards equally over the years and I've always ended up having more problems overall with them than with Nvidia cards & drivers. If I were inclined to generalize I could say that open source drivers are apparently lower quality, right? 🙂

But that would be just as silly as the other way around. I don't think that open or closed drivers, in itself, automatically says anything about quality.

If closed source drivers really were a problem then Nvidia wouldn't be used by 80% of Linux gamers.

Its a proprietary driver, which could be an insane security and privacy risk. Its a modification to your kernel, normal on Windows, but not on Linux. It basically makes Linuxes security model weak.

Often times it doesn't install or they insist on using free software (read: free as in free speech)

A few reasons:

• There is a strong desire to see if there is secret sauce in the driver that makes their cards so darn performant. Could it be applied to other video drivers?
• To audit for vulnerabilities and fix them.
• To allow the driver to use some kernel internals that the kernel developers keep trying to wall proprietary drivers off from.
• Ideology
• Community might be able to hack it to work better with Wayland, since the Wayland team has no interest in extending any kind of support to proprietary driver driving GPU's... despite x11 working just fine forever. ... see Ideology.

Try playing games like Cyberpunk. I dare you :)

You are lucky if you can play without a crash for even one minute with that card. I am not exaggerating. Something is seriously messed up with the 20XX series.

Also Wayland is still a mess for Nvidia cards overall which is becoming more and more important.

using external kerner driver ("out of tree") come with caveats you need to take care of
typically most linux distros will do this completely transparent but certain usecases will be more complicated
espcially if you install packages outside of your linux distro repository like a newer kernel version or an older Virtual Box version