So true! Last week I did a fresh install of Mint with the recommended nvidia drivers, and only installed Brave, Steam, Discord, and Vampire Survivors on my 3080 PC… 15 FPS at best. Tried the open source nvidia drivers and, which stopped Steam from working (so weird). Re-installed steam and Vampire Survivors and still couldn’t get anything to work (even tried, and failed, to run a few other games). Boy it would be nice if nvidia put in more work to support Linux. 2025 will be the year for Team Red!
As a Linux noob I feel that lol… Currently on my Mint Laptop with an nvidia gpu (RTX 4060 Mobile version) and while most stuff worked out of the box, am running into several small annoyances:
- steam doesn’t launch (steamwebhelper doesn’t respond).
- Sleep mode just completely crashes the system once in a while.
- The GPU runs pretty warm, even if I don’t use anything / have the laptop closed.
- Tried to tinker around with the ‘nvidia-xconfig’ CLI in order to use a custom fan curve and it created a config file which completely stopped my desktop environment from even launching at startup… Somehow managed to recover the system through terminal shenanigans
To anyone thinking about switching to linux, do yourself a favor and do it on AMD hardware.
Skill issue, I installed linux (I use mint btw) and it just worked without any finagling.
How can it be a skill issue if you did nothing?
it’s the same as installing programs on your pc, the biggest issue would be that you have to use a cli because I dont know if you can install Nvidia drivers via gui
sudo apt install nvidia-driverCongratulations, firefox is now crashing
I still cant sleep my computer with a 2070 Ti. I just shut it down and start it up every time, which is pretty shitty.
That happens with my windows machine so eh. See if your distro has a hibernate option.
Not trying to criticize you or anything, just genuinely asking - why is it so much worse to turn your computer off when you’re done with it than putting it to sleep?
Because it takes 15 minutes to boot.
Send help.
I installed a Nvidia 3060 earlier this year. Ran the command, rebooted the system, everything works fine.
I installed it on silverblue earlier this year and it was almost fine except firefox would randomly crash all the time, which was frustrating. Also gaming is a whole mess with nvidia. I miss my AMD card
All these Nvidia driver memes are why I haven’t fully switched to Linux with my main rig (which is used solely for gaming). Servers, fuck yeah boy, Linux all the way. Stable as fuck and super lightweight. But I don’t need those to render things in 3D at 60+ FPS.
I also never got Wi-Fi drivers working until Ubuntu first came out and I tried it.
That kinda shit makes it feel like a catch-22: some things don’t work on Linux because nobody is developing that thing for Linux, and they aren’t developing that thing for Linux because people who use that thing don’t use Linux (because it’s not there). Partially why I learned to code; sometimes I want something that doesn’t exist so I must create it.
I’ve had wireless working in linux since 2002. 802.11b was complex but quick. I was still running slackware back then.
Haven’t had an Nvidia issue for years
It was slower to adopt Wayland but that’s resolved
Longevity of AMD is better but that same issue exists on other Operating Systems
Meanwhile in reality installing Nvidia drivers is literally just a checkbox in a Drivers menu in system settings. Unless you are using Arch or something.
I recently finally moved to Linux (Mint). I have Nvidia GPU and yes, all I had to do was check the box and the drivers installed automatically. No problems so far.
I still have Windows 11 installed though (dualboot). I know there’s some compatibility problems with Linux that’s affecting me, but Linux is my main OS.
The memes are extremely outdated at this point. I’ve been rocking Linux with a 3070 for the last year and a half and have only seen minor issues and major improvements. Not to say it’s perfect, but my issues have been more from me rocking arch Linux and breaking my system than Nvidia issues
Honestly, I’ve never had this problem. Two GPUs, two clicks in the gui driver manager.
This is actually an easy thing to do – usually. But you might get unlucky with the wrong hardware, as perhaps OP did.
2009 called
It’s asking why things haven’t changed in 14 years
(things are somewhat better)
IT’S FIXED!
Works fine for me? (opensuse tumbleweed)
Didn’t take much effort, hybrid mode got implemented automatically and then I just manually added a widget for quick switching between only integrated graphics, hybrid mode and only nvidia (basically never using that one, just either integrated or hybrid)
That’s nice! I’m glad it glad it worked so well for you. That’s the thing about configuration, sometimes it works without much effort!
I wish everyone shared your experience, but I guess it’s a YMMV kind of thing, right?
I’m generally very happy with opensuse tumbleweed, so far the best desktop distros I’ve tried. Very polished and user friendly.
LOL isn’t that the truth. I wanted my desktop to not bother chugging watts through my 3090 and generating excess heat when barely KDE Plasma and a browser is running, but trying to set up GPU offload just left me with a blank terminal screen.
Thank God for the geniuses who implemented Snapper rollbacks in OpenSUSE! Otherwise, the Nvidia drivers in the repos work fine and I’m scared to touch them…
Is the power consumption really that much more? I guess there is a significant difference but it might still not cost much.
In a desktop you use the powerful GPU all the time.
In my use case the laptop is always attached to a charger.
I never understood this. Maybe because I stick with basic distros like Ubuntu or Mint. But I have not had this issue.
I had issues in like… 2010 or so. But not for about a decade
I saw a meme about sound cards recently and thousands of likes on social media.
And I wonder if it’s people up voting because they remember that era, if it’s bots, or if it’s just people who kinda get the joke and don’t want to be left out?
most likely the last one. especially in computer science, there’s always a lot of people who sorta understand and just want to be included. that’s why most computer science memes are “JavaScript bad” or “python slow” or other super basic mass opinions. I feel like it’s super rare I see an actually original computer science meme
I haven’t had issues for about a decade. I haven’t had an nvidia card for about a decade either. I think the two may be connected.
I will say as someone who uses a NVIDIA card gaming through proton works flawlessly. Certain apps may have bugs. I’m having this one issue where H.265 videos don’t play properly in VLC or MPV.
It depends a lot on which specific GPU you have and whether it’s a laptop.
New-ish GPU in a desktop with the monitor plugged directly into the GPU? Easy to get working, literally a checkbox on most distros.
1000 series GPU or older in a laptop and you need reasonable battery life and/or some “advanced” features like DP Alt-Mode? Good luck.
Edit: Also, no Wayland until very recently. Possibly never, depending on the age of the GPU.
Got a 2070 TI EVGA. They don’t make those anymore!
I used Ubuntu for many years on an nvidia machine and had a shit ton of nvidia problems, but I haven’t used Ubuntu for a long time now so I would hope there’s been progress. The experience has made me a lifelong AMD user since though.
Same, I’m on OpenSUSE, nVidia hosts its own OpenSUSE repo. As far back as 8 years(for me) you add the repo and add the driver. Everything works.
Saaame. There was a while there where Wayland didn’t work on the repo version so I had to go full manual, but otherwise it’s been almost perfect now, Wayland and all.
Fedora here and same. It’s just a few commands to get started and everything else works fine
I’ve never had trouble installing them. Getting them to work after an update is another story.
Lolz
pacman -S nvidia-dkmsHollywood, here I come!
Partial updates are not supported on Arch. You need to use
-Syu.I think you’re misunderstanding what a partial upgrade is.
A partial upgrade is where you update the database without then upgrading every package (calling
pacman -Sywith theuswitch).pacman -S, therefore, is not a partial upgrade, as the database is not updated with theyswitch.See System maintenance#Partial upgrades are unsupported for more info.
Yeah, obviously, who wouldn’t know that
I thought dkms was recommended only for alternative kernels, and that nvidia or nvidia-open is what’s recommended generally.
Recommended, yes, but I’ve had issues with the pre-compiled modules before, so I switched to
nvidia-dkmsto make sure the binaries are always freshly baked.
Installing’s easy. Does it work? No 🫠 I still can’t daily drive linux because how shitty NVIDIA’s drivers are
I can daily drive linux just fine on 3060ti, the Ollama CUDA AI acceleration works without a single issue straight out of the box.
I do want to be able to game on my main rig though, but that’s what I have a laptop with an Intel low-end integrated GFX card for.
Depends on what distro you used. What’s the distro, driver version and graphic card did you try?
NixOS (same problem, all distros) 570 drivers, RTX 3060
Currently on hyprland, same issue with sway/other wlroots compositors (KDE/GNOME work fine-ish, but i prefer compositors and they’re full of worse NVIDIA bugs on their own)
The problem’s with proton (or DXVK? Dunno) and how input delay increases heavily with V-Sync enabled. Unfortunately i have to use v-sync, so just dealing with it isn’t a choice for me, sorry
complains about linux being complicated
uses NixOS
I think I found your issue… Most Linux distros just work nowadays.
I’m not complaining that linux is complicated, though. I can use NixOS just fine. I’m talking about NVIDIA drivers being broken, and i’ve tried multiple distros.
Did you enable all the hyprland NVIDIA tweaks im running a 3070 on nix hypr and had issues but after setting all the nvidia tweaks and env variables I’ve had no issue with vsync and playing games with bad input lag and I play competitive shooters so I can tell
If by tweaks you mean:
MODULES=(… nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm …)
options nvidia_drm modeset=1 fbdev=1
env = LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME,nvidia
env = __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME,nvidia
Then yeah :/ Could you possibly share the relevant parts of your config please? TIA
I’m at work currently but those and the nixos programs.hyprland.nvidiaPatches I use the hyprland flake rather then just the package I’ve had better luck
But this GitHub has a lot of the relevant stuff https://gist.github.com/sioodmy/1932583dd8a804e0b3fe86416b923a16
Thank you! I’ll take a skim over the gist and your dotfiles. This should be really helpful :)
I have a better one. Installing ATI drivers mid 2000s.
Adjusting for overscan in the 2000s…
