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Thinking of making the plunge into Linux for HTPC, what's possible?

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mwillems:

--- Quote from: mattkhan on August 31, 2015, 09:57:17 am ---It looks more like a refactoring exercise than substantial improvements in performance. Is there a good reason to use nouveau over the nvidia driver?

--- End quote ---

I had the same question.  Apart from ideological/software freedom issues the proprietary driver has been a homerun for me.  Zero problems, excellent performance.  Admittedly, I'm only using it on Arch which means I always have up to date kernels and drivers, so maybe the older version packaged in Debian isn't up to snuff?  It's a bit of a blocker for wayland, but otherwise works great.

The proprietary driver's performance is not completely competitive with the windows driver's performance, but there's no madvr on Linux so video card performance isn't as mission-critical right now for HTPC use anyway.

mattkhan:
As far as I have noticed, the proprietary driver stays reasonably current on Debian as newer versions hit the various backports streams. Of course you always have the option of using only v old drivers if you really want to :)

mwillems:

--- Quote from: mattkhan on August 31, 2015, 10:35:33 am ---As far as I have noticed, the proprietary driver stays reasonably current on Debian as newer versions hit the various backports streams. Of course you always have the option of using only v old drivers if you really want to :)

--- End quote ---

The current Jessie backport is about 7 months old (340.76 released mid-January).  The current Arch driver is about 3 days old (352.41 released near the end of August).  I'll admit that "only 7 months old" is pretty good for debian (no insult intended, I love debian), but if you're playing new-ish games (many of which now run natively on linux) that kind of lag will be a killer.

mattkhan:

--- Quote from: mwillems on August 31, 2015, 10:43:43 am ---The current Jessie backport is about 7 months old (340.76 released mid-January).  The current Arch driver is about 3 days old (352.41 released near the end of August).  I'll admit that "only 7 months old" is pretty good for debian (no insult intended, I love debian), but if you're playing new-ish games (many of which now run natively on linux) that kind of lag will be a killer.

--- End quote ---
Does anyone attempt to game on Debian stable? Seems unwise to me. Anyway looping back on topic, the OP has plenty of options for a distro if  he decides to try it on Linux.

mwillems:

--- Quote from: mattkhan on August 31, 2015, 11:06:09 am ---Anyway looping back on topic, the OP has plenty of options for a distro if  he decides to try it on Linux.

--- End quote ---

It's true, and I wasn't intending that as a digression.  I wanted to highlight the age of drivers issue generally as newer cards don't work so well (or at all) with older drivers, and in case OP's HTPC use-case includes gaming. Several of my HTPCs are also used for gaming, with the games launched from theater view so I tend to think of the cases as related even though, you're right, they aren't necessarily.  In retrospect a GT720 is old enough that he shouldn't have an issue with any modern distro.

Apologies for the pseudo-digression; if your card didn't come out fairly recently (i.e. a 960 or something else that's only supported post 340), then the world's your oyster.

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