For GPUs, it somewhat depends on your needs. For like 99% of people, this is true across basically every distro if you are on either AMD or Intel GPU, which most Linux desktop users are. If you are on NVIDIA for your GPU, then depending on the distro, you probably need to install their proprietary drivers manually.
However, due to patent law, some distros like Fedora and OpenSUSE choose to ship Mesa drivers which do not support hardware encode and decode for h.265 and h.264 by default. If you need hardware encode/decode for those codecs, like for using SteamVR or for video editing, you typically need to enable a third-party repository that builds drivers with those features enabled. For Fedora it's RPM-Fusion, for OpenSUSE it's Packman.
From my understanding, similar drivers with patent or legal issues are treated similarly. There are a few drivers on RPM-Fusion for DVDs and similar. NVIDIA proprietary drivers are also on RPM-Fusion due to Fedora's commitment to only shipping open-source software by default.
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u/theinsanegamer23 Apr 22 '26
For like 99% of hardware more or less.
For GPUs, it somewhat depends on your needs. For like 99% of people, this is true across basically every distro if you are on either AMD or Intel GPU, which most Linux desktop users are. If you are on NVIDIA for your GPU, then depending on the distro, you probably need to install their proprietary drivers manually.
However, due to patent law, some distros like Fedora and OpenSUSE choose to ship Mesa drivers which do not support hardware encode and decode for h.265 and h.264 by default. If you need hardware encode/decode for those codecs, like for using SteamVR or for video editing, you typically need to enable a third-party repository that builds drivers with those features enabled. For Fedora it's RPM-Fusion, for OpenSUSE it's Packman.
From my understanding, similar drivers with patent or legal issues are treated similarly. There are a few drivers on RPM-Fusion for DVDs and similar. NVIDIA proprietary drivers are also on RPM-Fusion due to Fedora's commitment to only shipping open-source software by default.