Distro Fever: Memory Loss Edition

I actually like Gnome. Weird, I know.

What’s your issue with Gnome?

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Well, the web isn’t exactly running Gnome and Nvidia, though. I mean, you’re right of course. But the tech stack of Linux desktop apps and your usual web server are quite different.

And judging from the volume of expletives I hear from my colleagues, Nvidia on our compute servers isn’t exactly trouble free, either :wink:.

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Too much zooming icons and windows, and the fact you need to install extensions to get desktop icons and a minimize window buttons… Cinnamon is Gnome done right!

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For darktable, Nvidia has been rock stable for me since 2014.

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That’s good to hear! And perhaps the recent news of Nvidia opening up their kernel driver might mean even better stability and compatibility in the future.

Memory-related glitchiness notwithstanding, my Nvidia GPU so far has more than exceeded my expectations in terms of performance. I actually measured things, and the new 3060 on Linux is on average 10x faster than my old Vega M GH on Windows. (Though part of that is Windows vs Linux, and a bad case of severely outdated drivers)

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So, I’ve found some info for the memtest failures: some UEFI BIOS-es fail to correctly mark the areas already in use, which memtest should not overwrite while performing the test. These cases often result in incorrect reports and/or crashes of memtest.
Edit: Here’s the URL: MemTest86 - Freezing and Lockups

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Good to know, thank you!

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Nvidia has been pretty stable for some years now, specially in more stable distros where updates don’t break things so often, even so in arch for 3 years I only had it happen once and the next day it was resolved. After all it is also used in desktop linux in things like davinci resolve workstations and the like. Still their bad rep for closeness and not supporting the open standards is well deserved.

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By the way, does anyone know how the Nvidia driver is integrated in Ubuntu?

It seems that on Fedora and OpenSuse, installing the driver involved some compilation, required MOK enrollment, and marked the kernel as tainted. But in Ubuntu it seems to be a straight package install.

Which driver? The NVidia one or thre Nouveau FOSS one? By default you get Nouveau. But AFAIK neither requires compilation.

You can use the driver nvidia provides for your kernel version, since it works as a kernel module, the downside is that when you upgrade your kernel you might have some incompatibility problems at times. Since ubuntu works mostly in an LTS fashion this isn’t an issue. In fedora, arch, etc, you get the option of using akmod(fedora) or dkms(arch), which rebuilds the kernel module every time you upgrade your kernel, providing an extra layer of safety. Arch even has two distinct packages for this - ‘nvidia’ and ‘nvidia-dkms’ plus ‘nvidia-lts’ for people who run LTS kernels. Afaik either way will result in a tainted kernel, but it’s nothing to worry about.

Ubuntu also uses dkms.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=nvidia-dkms&searchon=names&suite=jammy&section=all

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Ah, my bad there! Was under the assumption that since they worked in a more stable model, they didn’t use it.

Ubuntu releases twice per year (it is my understanding that Fedora is similar in that respect). Every 2 years, there’s an LTS release (upon which Mint and KDE neon, and I think many others, are based). The non-LTS releases are referred to as ‘interim’, and they are supported for 9 months.

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I ran Xubuntu LTS here at home for several years and was very pleased with it. I prefer a more conventional UI, less Mac-like. I mean, I ran FVWM(95) at one point. What can I say…

My current laptop came with Windows, so I’m giving it a shot again but if I end up back on Linux at some point I’ll have to find a suitable distro. From what I’m hearing Ubuntu is going all snappy, which I want no part of (unless it got a lot better than my past limited experience fighting snap apps).

Is Slackware a viable option these days? From what I heard it was off and on, but it was always a pretty clean (if old-fashioned) distro.

Latest update seems to have been yesterday:

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

Good to hear it’s still ticking. Unfortunately at the moment I don’t have a spare physical machine to play with (nor time right now). I have a Mint VM on my Windows laptop, but I’ve not done much with it. So far anything I’ve needed to do in Linux I’ve done in WSL. But it’s no substitute for a real installation.

Thanks.

From the memtest troubleshooting:

We are often asked about the reliability of errors reported by MemTest86. In the vast majority of cases errors reported by the test are valid. There are some systems that cause MemTest86 to be confused about the size of memory and it will try to test non-existent memory. This will cause a large number of consecutive addresses to be reported as bad and generally there will be many bits in error. If you have a relatively small number of failing addresses and only one or two bits in error you can be certain that the errors are valid. Also intermittent errors are without exception valid. Frequently memory vendors question if MemTest86 supports their particular memory type or a chipset. MemTest86 is designed to work with all memory types and all chipsets.

Yes, thanks. Plus there’s the link I provided in

@lphilpot Look what I just found:

https://www.exton.se/tag/slackware/

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden