and it's been a joke for years. No news here I guess.
I use Ubuntu 16.10 (i7 4790k, Z97-UD5H, GTX770, 32 Gb, SSD EVO) and so far I was using Nouveau as driver. Since I don't play games on Linux, it's good enough.
I have encountered problems with nvidia drivers for years (and I DO mean years) and that's why I thought 'No need for nvidia drivers, Nouveau is fine'.
Today, I thought, well let's give it a shot. After all, we're in 2017 right? Both the Linux and Nvidia have come a long way so things should be better.
So here I am, decided to install some nvidia drivers. I know there are several ways : from nvidia, ppa and the official way.
I thought let's try the official way. Should be tested and all. So I went to the system settings and check the 'use Nvidia binary driver 367.57 (proprietary, tested)' option and, confident (my second error, the first one being 'we're in 2017, things are better now'), reboot the system.
Strangely it takes some time to reboot but well it's the first reboot after the installation, so it may be normal.
Finally I get on the desktop. Things seems okay. Because I'm curious to see if the boot process will get back to normal, I reboot again. I see right away that it takes forever to shutdown. Then it takes also forever to get to the grub (on a SSD, I find that rather disturbing). Finally, the desktop pops up and it works fine. Then, in a 'crazy' move, I decide to check the consoles (because I remember the nvidia drivers have always messed up the tty). CTRL+ALT F1 and... nothing. Black screen. I try tty2, 3, 4 and so on. Nothing. I try to get back to the desktop CTRL+ALT F7 and... nothing... for like 30 seconds.
So, here I am: a functional desktop (if I'm not in a hurry to get there) and no tty consoles (because who need them with the multiple terminal solutions today...). And we're in 2017.
I'm sure there are some solutions. I dealt with that countless times. But I find just incredible such problems still exist on Linux and especially on the desktop (sadly not the only problem there, like the distro upgrade from within the desktop, I have never seen it working properly, not once in years). I try to talk about Linux to people tired of Windows but when I see that kind of problem, there is no way Linux gains new users. I know I probably can fix it but what about the pure users?
I don't know if it's a kernel thing or the 'evil' proprietary drivers from Nvidia but it sucks and it's quite sad. Real, real, REAL sad. Not for me, not for all the geeks, techies, hackers here and there but for the rest of the world. And that's a LOT of people.
Eric
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