I’m planning on changing to Linux eventually, but my PC has a 4060ti. I have heard that Nvidia drivers are a pain to install, and I don’t have the means to change to a non-Nvidia GPU. Am I in trouble?
Stick to Production version of Nvidia Linux driver - v550, v570. I’m using v570 on Ubuntu 25.04, no issue in either day to day work or in gaming.
its not difficult
It’s usually just one command to run.
It used to be a pain. Multiple versions that didn’t all work. Today it’s pretty painless. A lot of installers will actually do it for you now.
In arch (at least the last time I did it), it was just a matter of picking the right package and installing it with pacman
EndeavorOS’s installer will do it for you
I use Fedora these days. It didn’t do it automatically the last time I loaded from scratch (not an upgrade), but the rpm fusion team/repository made it simple. I just followed the crystal clear instructions on their website.
I think mint does it automatically with the installer…
Honestly I really don’t even think about nvidia drivers anymore.
The first trick is knowing that there’s a right package. The second trick is knowing what the right package is.
It’s trivial. Use Linux Mint or Debian, enable non-free repositories if required, and that’s pretty much it.
I’ve never had issues with Nvidia drivers. Your mileage may vary.
Sometimes it’s plug-n-play and everything works great. Sometimes you press the update Nvidia drivers button on your Ubuntu work computer and then need to tell IT you bricked your OS. YMMV
No, you’ll be fine. And some distros trivialize it. In my case I don’t get as good of framerates as I would on Windows, so there are some issues due to Nvidia not providing open source drivers, but it still works with Linux.
Ya, I must have started using Linux well after Ubuntu made it really easy to install drivers.
Granted you do need to know where to find the option to install drivers, at least you used to maybe its even easier now, but I havent used Ubuntu in a few years.
Once you found where the option to install was it was a click of a button
What distro are you using? It’s getting pretty simple at this point. I’m running Arch and it maybe took 5 minutes to fully set it up.
I’m thinking Mint.
Aren’t they installed by default on Mint? Definitely are on some distros, I think EndeavourOS and Garuda Linux for example
They are not. You have to install the proprietary driver from the GUI driver installer app with 2 clicks.
Try Nobara if you plan on playing video games, it’s a distro specialised for gaming and they have two sets of ISO : one “standard” and one “Nvidia” with the drivers preinstalled so you don’t have to do anything.
I think the installer gives you a choice between the open-source drivers and the proprietary ones, and that’s it. Everything works fine even on Wayland.
Installing Nvidia drivers from official repos provided by the maintainers of your distro? Easy as pie.
Installing Nvidia drivers from nvidia’s website? Good luck my friend, I hope you know what you’re doing.
Barely a week later and I had to do the thing. My partner uses LMDE and Nvidia 535 is the newest version in their repos, but we need nvidia 565+ for Kingdom Hearts 3.
Installing from the website wasn’t as hard as I remember.
- Blacklist Nouveau.
- As root, without an X server running, run the nvidia*.run file from the website
- Follow the prompts.
- Verify your initramfs rebuilt correctly before rebooting.
- Reboot and enjoy your actually current driver.
- Bonus step, restore your Xorg.conf backup because you’re on a multigpu laptop and you just borked the Xorg.conf with the installer so mesa doesn’t end up loading and X ends up dead on summon
Not at all anymore. Just please use your distros repositories.
I told my friend to just use the package manager but he was dead set on downloading the drivers from Nvidia’s website and installing them manually. Then complained how hard it was.
Old habits
It really depends on how the distro you’re using is integrating them and while installing them is usually the easy part, working around certain quirks they come with can be a bit tedious in my experience.
The proprietary driver comes in binary form and is shipped with a small kernel module that handles loading the binary driver. The Linux kernel modules that aren’t part of Linux itself (which most drivers are) must be compiled for specific kernel and its binary can work only for that specific kernel and nothing else. This means that even if then driver is the same but kernel changes, the nvidia module must still be recompiled. There are two ways distros handle that: 1) by running the compilation process in the background while installing or updating the driver package 2) by shipping binary form of the nvidia module, in case where it’s distro that always recommends synchronization of all packages so that kernel and modules always match. Historically this caused way more problems than it sounds, compilation might have failed for certain kernels occasionally leaving users with broken video after simple system update. Overall though it mostly works fine, especially nowadays.
Another quirk is that the user-space part of the driver that exposes OpenGL and Vulkan interfaces for applications are also proprietary and closed source, and they must also match exactly with the kernel part of the driver. This creates another problem for sandboxed applications using for instance Flatpak. Applications in container won’t use the system-wide libraries, but rather ship their own - and that’s by design for good reasons. Flatpak will automatically detect NVIDIA and install matching driver just fine, but then after installing system upades, you must always update your flatpaks as well or the ones that use GPU in any way will simply fail to launch or fall back to software rendering making it extremely slow. This doesn’t happen for open source drivers, because Mesa can work with basically any kernel, so Mesa in Flatpak can be in completely different version than the one installed as system package. Moreover, I experienced problems with storage space because Flatpak wouldn’t automatically remove old NVIDIA drivers and after a year or so it was a chunky pile of NVIDIA drivers.
And even when it works, there can still be missing functionality or integration with the OS might not be perfect. Last time I used them I was limited to X11 with many quirks regarding multi monitor setup and vertical synchronization. Wayland is technically usable now on NVIDIA, but not perfected yet.
The kernel part of the NVIDIA driver is Open Source now.
That depends on which GPU you’re using as nvidia-open is for Turing and newer, but that makes no practical difference as it is and will always be out-of-tree.
Bazzite makes it ridiculously easy, there’s just a dropdown to select the nvidia version of their ISO. It’s also a great distro for beginners for a lot of reasons:
bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically, this is fantastic for reliability, but it also has pretty up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
there’s also aurora if you want the same thing without some addons for gamers.
bazzite is essentially identical
I wouldn’t say that. It is very different in it’s atomic nature, not to mention the pre-packaged software and tweaks.
I meant identical to fedora atomic.
I mean not to be pedantic but there is no “fedora atomic”. There is Fedora Kinoite, Fedora Sway, Fedora Silverblue, etc. Bazzite is just yet another Fedora atomic release.
Actually there was a recent rebrand, https://fedoramagazine.org/introducing-fedora-atomic-desktops/
This isn’t recent, this is over a year old. Also note that “desktops” is plural. As in the ones I listed above make up “Fedora atomic desktops”.
I consider that recent, but… yeah, they’re the fedora atomic desktops. Bazzite is identical to them, you can pick kde or gnome, so it isn’t just kinoite or silverblue, so, atomic is more accurate in this context.
In my experience, dealing with repeated nvidia problems is not worth the hassle. Just replace it with a good AMD graphics card and sell that nvidia thing.
If I had the money, sure. But I don’t.
AMD’s been a better community member but like others said, even if Nvidia is more of a “pain” it’s generally easier than windows on most distros. They’ll detect and install it for you or it’s just a single package to install from the software library.
Some free advice, If you’re worried about it stick with a mainstream distro. They’ll have tested releases more. it may seem counter intuitive but apply updates often, updates over multiple versions are more likely to have untested combinations of packages. If the drivers stop working, you’ll just not have acceleration, just uninstall and reinstall the drivers.
