HP ENVY TE01-3xxx with a NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX video card.

Prelude - I had Debian 12, MX Linux, and later Mint Linux LMDE 6 installed
trying to determine the cause of my desktop's instant lockups - with no
recourse but to power down. No error messages were logged about the
crashes.

I did have some error messages about bluetooth, but disabled bluetooth and
nothing changed.

Followup:

This crashing continued on all three Debian based Distros. Debian 12, MX
linux and Mint Linux LMDE. All three continued to suffer from no notice
random freezing at least once daily. It was getting so bad, I did not want
to do anything useful, as I may have a crash and lose my data.

I downloaded and installed the proper NVIDIA drivers and the problem went
away in both Mint and MX Linux Distributions. I had already removed Debian
12 by this point so no comment on it.

I found I am not a KDE person, fwiw.

When I installed any KDE DE distro, the problem was not present. It makes
me believe there is an unknown conflict between XFCE and the Nouveau
driver that is not an issue with a proper NVIDIA driver.

I do not think the, Nouveau driver is ready for prime time for all NVidia
cards.

Of course ymmv.

On 2023-10-18, azigni wrote:
> HP ENVY TE01-3xxx with a NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX video card.
> [...]

Knowing the exact video card is somewhat critical here.

> [...]
> I do not think the, Nouveau driver is ready for prime time for all NVidia
> cards.

Nouveau is perfectly fine for cards anywhere from about six months to
one year old to about 10-12 years old. The old cards depend mainly on
nVidia's dropping of support (although nouveau may still work for a while
after that). New cards depend mainly on your distro's release cycle --
for example Debian will be extremely slow; Ubuntu LTS will usually be a
few months to a year (HWE Kernels via their short-term releases).

Now, obviously, if you stray from "distro supplied kernels", you can
chase the bleeding edge of offerings as fast as the kernel devteam has
things available.

--
|_|O|_|
|_|_|O| Github: https://github.com/dpurgert
|O|O|O| PGP: DDAB 23FB 19FA 7D85 1CC1 E067 6D65 70E5 4CE7 2860

On 10/18/2023 5:51 AM, Dan Purgert wrote:
> On 2023-10-18, azigni wrote:
>> HP ENVY TE01-3xxx with a NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX video card.
>> [...]
>
> Knowing the exact video card is somewhat critical here.
>
>> [...]
>> I do not think the, Nouveau driver is ready for prime time for all NVidia
>> cards.
>
> Nouveau is perfectly fine for cards anywhere from about six months to
> one year old to about 10-12 years old. The old cards depend mainly on
> nVidia's dropping of support (although nouveau may still work for a while
> after that). New cards depend mainly on your distro's release cycle --
> for example Debian will be extremely slow; Ubuntu LTS will usually be a
> few months to a year (HWE Kernels via their short-term releases).
>
> Now, obviously, if you stray from "distro supplied kernels", you can
> chase the bleeding edge of offerings as fast as the kernel devteam has
> things available.
>

Some of those seem to be RTX-3000 series video cards (desktop box).
Because there will be multiple models, you'd need

inxi -F

to collect details. It's hard to say whether the Nouveau team
can keep up with these releases, when each card needs reverse engineering.
The RTX series have ray tracing as a feature (not important to general
computing).

For example, my placeholder video card has this line in inxi -F .

OpenGL: ... NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti) ...

so the model can be extracted from the output of inxi.

Because there's a bug in my 1000 series cards, I like to run
the NVidia driver instead of Nouveau. It feels like a watchdog
is in there, with the NVidia driver, and not one, with the Nouveau
driver.

Paul