I’m pretty sure it is or at least will be at some point

Thanks for nothing Microsoft

I wish you a beautiful downfall Abode

Not bad huh?

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.

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.

Didn’t they explicitly ask via #metoo movement and what not for men to NOT approach them directly ever or else they screem that this is harassment?

It literally hasn’t changed even a tiny bit since I first saw it in 2006 :)

I currently use Strawberry - a well maintained fork of the old Amarok player before they redone the UI for KDE 4. It does what I care the most:

• Tree view collection with artist -> album grouping
• Files view
• Lyrics
• Tag editor
• Queue
• Last, but definitely not least - gapless playback

„Piracy is a service problem” ~Gabe Newell

It’s Windows 95

The guy himself, a communist legend

Because it was. Only very late right before the project was killed they renamed it

I have no idea how people keep recommending that distro to beginners and regular end users only based on what the experience is like right after installing it.

It was such a pain daily driving it for couple of months even for experienced user. updates breaking stuff every now and then, packages reverting versions oddly, causing conflicts in plasma packages, when using SteamDeck mode it would auto-install updates on boot without asking and bootlooping for no reason until I disconnect it from the network, plymouth theme changing randomly. Usually to troubleshoot I had to go to their Discord to see what broke this time. I mean, fine, but this is an unstable tinkerer purely community-driven distro, not meant for those who just want easy time dealing with their PCs. Besides, none of that shit happens on just regular plain Arch btw, once setup properly it updates just fine.

EDIT: maybe it’s any better in Nobara 41?

If you come with expectations that you’ll just be fully catered no matter what your setup is and expect things to just work without ever trying to understand problems, you sure can be disappointed. Believe or not, most of the time those issues are out of control for Linux or the distros, as your hardware vendor made it to work on Windows and Windows only. Community is here to help you, but with your attitude it gets difficult no matter how much others try to help.

Don’t forget that at this point X11 doesn’t have feature parity with Wayland more than the other way around. Mixed DPIs, refresh rates, multi-display VRR, virtual screen resolutions, nested compositing, direct scan-out, GPU hot plugging, DRM leasing, HDR are all exclusive or at least better on Wayland.

It actually was merged just few days ago, I mean the color management protocol

You have to decide whether you want to be Linux app or GNOME app

On 6 you can have similar experience to Latte with just the panel minus the animations and some of its customizations

Tweaks and preconfigured distros aren’t solution here. The driver is still lacking certain features and that can only be fixed by NVIDIA

Steam home console now makes more sense than ever given that the current console generation is sort of ass. A box with gigantic library of games from day 1, supporting all modern TV features, new titles all the time guaranteed, flexibility, not being locked down to just one ecosystem… And if it’s comparable to PS5/Xbox it can get a lot of traction, just like Steam Deck.