Zorin 17.2 feedback

[Aravisian]

@StarTreker

Also, my old 2012 notebook computer, that I gave to a family member, who is running POP OS on it, has to force the computer to launch with an older kernel as well, otherwise the computer boots to black screen.

Actually, I agree with this grievance.
So... POP_OS seeks to be a bit cutting edge. We know this. But in the end, the kernel teams trim too much sometimes. 2012 was a long time ago. Even so, e-waste is a thing. And e-waste is a very big deal.
Did you know that we threw $15 billion into the trash in gold that is in e-waste in just the USA alone last year?
Weirdness.
We are struggling to mine this stuff out of the ground to replace the same amounts we used in the previous years garbage - that is still there. In the landfills.
Intelligent species.

The newer kernels should include support for the newer hardware in addition to the previous hardware. Not support only new hardware.
Most of the time, it does. But there are plenty of cases (called regressions) where previous support gets removed in order to make the kernel smaller. You can see why that is a troublesome balancing act... Over time a kernel can get very bloated. Or, it can get over-trimmed.

Since using an older kernel works, though: Problem Solved. Just set that kernel to default boot and forget about it.

[Frog]

You may want to avoid NVIDIA driver 550 if you're on a laptop

Very interesting ..... I'm running a 5 year old Asus ROG 17 in gaming laptop and 550 runs just fine ....

I did however do something stupid ..... while playing Hunter Call of the Wild on Steam I decided to see if I could vamp up my settings and chose " Performance Mode " in my NVIDIA settings ..... I had been running " On-Demand " ......

Didn't notice anything when playing two other games but when I went back to Hunter COTW after about 4-5 minutes it disconnected from the game gave a Steam error message and then screen went black and my keyboard started flashing the back-lit led lights on and off ..... I hard booted and restarted the system ..... entered the game again only to have the same thing happen .....

It was then I remembered what I had done in the NVIDIA settings and switched it back .... wala ..... no problems I played for about 2 hours yesterday without a hitch .... Hunter COTW is a much more graphic intensive game than Russian Fishing or the pool game I was playing before ......

Other than that I have been running the 550 driver on both a dual boot of Zorin and Mint for a while now .....

Just my take on the 550 NVIDIA driver ......

[Aravisian]

For me, the 550 redirected too much to my CPU causing it to get very hot. Other Nvidia drivers have done this and Nvidia seems to do some back and forth on this, with one release doing it, the next fixing that, the next re-introducing it...

I get why Storm switched to AMD.

[Storm]

Driver 555 will brick my system despite which distro I use. So I moved to driver 560.

[StarTreker]

Hello my Linux buddies!

I have a update for you all. I decided that today was going to be computer house keeping day. I first began by installing the newest Nvidia driver 560 driver. It installed without a hitch, and I was able to reboot the computer without a hitch as well, no black screens!

After this, I booted up the software updater, which always seems to fail to fetch the StarLabs repo, but was able to install a bunch of updates I was holding off on. No kernel updates, because I am on OS 16, and it maxes out with the 5.15 kernel, so no big deal there, software and security updates were the bigger deal here.

Screenfetch

Neofetch

After reading what @Aravisian said about his CPU temperatures running the 550 driver, it gave me a good idea to check my CPU/GPU temps in Psensor, temps look good!

Psensor

The driver seemed to have been running well at first. And while I did initially forget to set my computer to favor the Nvidia GPU by default, I made sure to get that set, to remove any doubt regarding performance.

I wasn't able to launch my games on Steam, which I thought was weird. And then when I went to stream video's on Youtube, I noticed that the video only plays smooth, when in default view mode.

But when I went to full screen, the video plays choppy. Those of you who are old enough to know 3DGameMan, he uploaded a video recently on his channel, where he went over the fact he had lots of problems, games crashing and whatnot, with the 560 driver.

So, its looking like the Nvidia 560 driver is yet another hot pile of garbage. So, I am feeling pretty beat down from this, which sucks. Usually, I don't regret my Nvidia driver updates, but I really regret this one!

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[Aravisian]

@StarTreker

where he went over the fact he had lots of problems, games crashing and whatnot, with the 560 driver.

So, its looking like the Nvidia 560 driver is yet another hot pile of garbage. So, I am feeling pretty beat down from this, which sucks. Usually, I don't regret my Nvidia driver updates

I regret them more often than I should. And this is compounded by the game makers demanding with nagware that you upgrade graphics drivers to the latest Nvidia drivers the very moment that the latest is released. If Nvidia was stable and reliable, that nagware would be much less annoying. As it is, the game makers are saying, "For the best experience, update your Nvidia Drivers to running across a busy freeway with your eyes closed."

[Storm]

With driver 555 my rig is brick. With driver 560 half of the game won't launch, bummer. (Just tested my most used games as @StarTreker mentioned it).

[StarTreker]

@Aravisian

I regret them more often than I should. And this is compounded by the game makers demanding with nagware that you upgrade graphics drivers to the latest Nvidia drivers the very moment that the latest is released. If Nvidia was stable and reliable, that nagware would be much less annoying. As it is, the game makers are saying, "For the best experience, update your Nvidia Drivers to running across a busy freeway with your eyes closed."

You are absolutely 100% right dude! Developers are like, everybody needs to make sure their Nvidia drivers are updated to the latest version, to take advantage of the latest in technology, in our games. You never hear them say, you may not want to update to the latest Nvidia version, as it could give you crashes, or laggy behavior.

Guess what? I just downgraded my Nvidia driver to 555, and all the sudden video's play properly on Youtube now, I am going to see if I can launch a game real quick... Alright, I just tested 2-games, since downgrading the video driver.

Halo Masterchief Collection, now is able to launch, and plays normally, and smoothly, I just quickly tested Halo 4 as game of choice, in testing that. Only issue I had, was when I tried to exit the game via the normal method, the game froze, and required a force quit, which worked.

The 2nd game I tried, was Star Trek Resurgence. I was both able to launch the game, play the game, it plays smoothly, and I was able to quit the game the normal way, game didn't freeze at all. So not sure if HMCC, closing is driver related or game related, all I know is, it didn't do that before with driver 540.

Anyways, while I didn't want to go to all the work to downgrade my driver, because I felt beat down, I realized I had to, cause not only could I not game with 560, I couldn't even use the computer, with all the laggy video I was experiencing. That is now all gone thankfully.

So I think what I am going to do, is rather then waste my time trying to decipher the developers mistake for a work around, I am going to stick to driver 555, and wait till Nvidia sorts our their incompetence, for the next following driver. Thats what I did the last time I ran into an issue like this with Nvidia.

So just a quick recap, Nvidia driver 560 absolutely is a disaster on my machine, but Nvidia driver 555, seems to work good for the most part.

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[Aravisian]

To be fair...

Nvidia 560 is quite new. Nvidia drivers include point releases the same way many things do, including this forums Operating System.

A couple point releases into the 560 may well fix things up.
I did look at the bug reports for the 560 real quickly and one of them is a regression that is easily fixed that applies to Windows machines. Bitrates can be ignored when using certain encoding. Also an easy fix.

A person may not need to wait for 565.

[Michel]

Nvidia on windows sucks too. Last year i got alot of bsod. The error message always pointed to nvidia. The bsod issues happend around the same time i upgraded my nvme’s and ram. I checked everything if they where not failling.

After a while i checked reddit and the nvidia forum and there where more people reporting the nvlddmkm bsod. It took nvidia 4 months to fix it. The drivers where so bad last year (537.58 was the only last stable one from the last months). Everything after that was ■■■■. Cpu temps increasing and so on. I posted alot on the MSI forum about that.

https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/msi-crosshair-15-b12u-latest-driver-updates.387144/page-13#post-2224359

It’s not a linux problem, nvidia is to stupid to create good working drivers. Nvidia is to much focused on AI.

[jhob101]

I tried 560 recently and had a whole load of issues. Main one was in JetBrains IDEs, something to do with the java jcef runtime. Going back to 555 resolved it.

[Michel]

Can't confirm any issues on the Acer machine here. On the NVIDIA forum their are tons of complaint

[Ponce-De-Leon]

Ah, okay. Interesting.

[Locklear93]

@Aravisian

"For the best experience, update your Nvidia Drivers to running across a busy freeway with your eyes closed."

With recent games, they have more reason to do that than ever before. Nvidia works with developers to include optimizations in drivers and bug fixes for issues reported to them by developers, but more broadly, DLSS support, at least for DLSS 2 and 3, needs inclusion in drivers on a per-game basis. It's entirely possible I've just been lucky, and I'm DEFINITELY not someone using older hardware Nvidia's not testing on, but I haven't actually had any problems with the newest drivers on Windows. I'm not saying they don't exist; just that as an early adopter on both Nvidia hardware and drivers, I never had issues in Windows, and my Linux issues have been limited (so far...) to Wayland and the big kernel 6.8 blowup that spawned so many posts here, which I understand to have been a kernel side problem.