The nightmare of Intel Integrated GPUs under Linux in general and Debian in particular
Around the end of 2014 I moved to Debian as my primary operating
system. In that year my computer was a Dual Core CPU with integrated
GPU. It worked just fine with the previous operating system but as
soon I started to use Debian every day I got system freezes that I
quickly diagnose as GPU bugs. Those days Wheezy was the current stable
release. Few months later Jessie was out, and the system freezes still
where there. And they were related to the Intel GPU.
Someone told me my CPU was too old and nobody will look for a solution
in such old hardware, so in 2018 I upgraded my computer to a i5 with
HD530 Intel GPU. Things worked fine for one or two weeks, until a new
Intel GPU system freeze happend. I tried testing and unstable, but the
freezes where still happening. Stretch went out and the freezes
continued. Buster was out, and the problems with Intel GPUs are still
causing complete system freezes. My last complete system freeze was
yesterday: three complete system freezes in less than an hour.
My first bug report about a system freeze was in 2015 (see Debian bug
#787267) and my last report was only a few days ago. I went from
Wheezy to Buster, from kernel 3.16 up to kernel 5.4, and with all of
them I had serious GPU issues (system hangs/freezes/display
corruptions).
Almost five years suffering this day after day is just too much for
me. I need a solution. Kernels 5.5 just seems as buggy as all the
previous ones at least related to the Intel GPUs and according to the
new bug reports at Freedesktop's Gitlab.
What are my alternatives? nVidia cards? I've never used an nVidia card
but I have read also tons of problems with them in the past. How about
now? And how about AMD cards?
What are your recommendations / experiences?
Thanks in advance.
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