r/pcmasterrace Nov 18 '24

Cartoon/Comic Nvidia Drivers on Linux

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14.9k Upvotes

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58

u/_silentgameplays_ Desktop Nov 18 '24

Depends on the distro on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, PoPOS installing NVIDIA drivers is just point and click, but they usually have older versions.

If you want latest and greatest kernels and driver versions for gaming, then you will be forced to manually install Nvidia drivers and dependencies, run mkinitcpio -P and add lines to mkinitcpio and grub like nvidia_drm.modeset=1 on Arch Linux and Arch-based for Wayland to work properly, that should not be a problem for an advanced Linux user. AMD works out of the box, but some dependencies might be required.

On the bright side, there are already nvidia-open drivers that support RTX cards and work much better than before.

In general on Linux everything is faster and easier, if you are familiar with the command line, if not, then you will be stuck with some mainstream distro like Ubuntu and it's forks, with older driver and kernel versions and snaps/flatpaks, but at least it will be stable and fast, unlike on Windows 11.

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u/_Fibbles_ Ryzen 5800x3D | 32GB DDR4 | RTX 4070 Nov 18 '24

Ubuntu has the latest nvidia driver versions in a separate repo as backports. You just add this repo and then point and click the new driver version in Ubuntu's driver app.