How much of a pain is it to install Nvidia GPU drivers, really?
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?
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.
As long as you don't make the mistake of downloading them directly from Nvidia, it should be straight-forward.
Where am I supposed to get them then?
depends on your Distro, for Linux Mint it's just the Driver Manager.
To access the Driver Manager in Linux Mint, follow these steps:
Once you have opened the Driver Manager, follow these steps to install the Nvidia drivers:
Then reboot.
For most problems you can really just google stuff like "Linux Mint Nvidia Drivers"
From you distros package manager
Whatever distro you pick will have instructions for where and how to install the drivers, if it doesn't do so for you during the install. Ubuntu is probably most likely to do so easiest. I prefer Fedora for other reasons, which is also easy to get nvidia working, but sightly less easy than Ubuntu where it's a single checkbox during OS install.
If you happen to choose OpenSUSE, the " install recommends " will detect nVidia and load some drivers to get it working, but you can also add a specific repo nVidia hosts for Leap and Tumbleweed and download the Drivers / Cuda etc. They work great, so ignore the previous commentor. Laptops with dual GPU need you to setup a switching app to save power, when you don't need to power the nVidia. If your BIOS has a discrete graphics mode selection, you can choose hybrid, but if your OS has trouble you can set it to discrete only so nVidia is always used. I had to do this on one machine because the OS saw the two GPUs and was trying to treat them has two displays instead of one composite display choice
Each distro has it's own way of installing the drivers, Mint uses a driver Manager GUI, endeavour OS uses the nvidia-inst script, but ultimately, they come the repositories of the distro.
Some of them have dedicated Nvidia images and you don't have to do anything (theoretically, this has failed for me before). I had problems with the Nobara image but Bazzite worked flawlessly out of the box.
If you are on something like openSUSE, nVidia hosts a repo just for OpenSUSE Leap ams Tumbleweed, and that's exactly where you get them from, and they work.
Mistake? These drivers work much better than the ones in the non-free debian repo, at least for me
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.
It's horrible, you have to type "
<package manager>
install nvidia" and not make any typos at all or it won't work. The horror, I still get flashbacks.Classic "it works on my machine". When people have GPU driver issues, it's almost always NVIDIA.
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
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.
I use mint, and it's easier than on windows.. You open driver manager, tap on the newest driver, click apply. Then restart.
nowadays the install process on ubuntu consists of opening the driver app, selecting the nvidia driver, waiting around 3 minutes and rebooting when prompted.
sometimes things do break, but the install process itself is rarely the issue anymore, thankfully.
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
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.
Depends on the distro here is a list based on my experience
The .run on nvidias website it's harder and requires some linux experience
Agree on Mint. The Nvidia drivers installed automatically for me. They're 4-5 months old, but they're stable.
yay -S nvidia-open
Are the open source drivers good now?
According to the Arch Wiki, it's the driver recommended by NVIDIA and, anecdotally, I was having issues in Wayland and with gamescope/HDR until I switched to the nvidia-open drivers.
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.
The NVIDIA problems are almost entirely legacy at this point. Unless you are using something that ships ancient packages (looking at you Debian Stable), you should be fine.
I use Garuda, you just install the Nvidia version and the updater handles updates automatically whenever you run it.
Easy peasy.
On NixOS I just copy and pasted like 2-4 lines of recommended configuration and applied it. The driver was then automatically downloaded and installed and I haven't had to touch it since.
In the case of NixOS, the question would then be : "How much pain in the ass is it to install NixOS, really ?"
For my desktop PC, it felt just as easy as any other distro, but for my servers and especially for my SBCs, a pain.
With CachyOS and Mint, it is very easy.
Remark: I disabled secure boot.
Depends on the distro. For most of the popular ones, it's as difficult as clicking a shortcut.
Trivial on Debian, see https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers
Source : been gaming nearly daily on Debian with 2080ti for years now. Sometimes also tinkering with local AI via containers.
It's not hard at all
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.
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.
Maybe for the most recent cards it's okay but I have a GTX 970 and let me tell you something mister you can't just upgrade without breaking some other thing and then when you roll back two more things break and it makes me sad
Porque no nouveau?
Nowadays it's easy AF pretty much everywhere. Sometimes there are simple GUI tools that get you there with just a few clicks. Hardest it will get is having to look it up in a wiki for the distribution you are using (if it doesn't have them preinstalled) and then following simple step-by-step instructions
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.
It's usually just one command to run.
I'm constantly surprised at this point how anyone fails at it. Not to mention there are a number of distros that provide them out of the box now and somehow people still say they couldn't install it.
I mean I use zorin which is an ubuntu spin just made to be as usable as possible out of the box so its super easy. Barely an inconvenience. I see someone mentions bricking but I have not encountered it but I tend to use old hardware soooooo.... oh and i should say old nough that a 4060ti would seem pretty new.
If you're using a desktop, it's not a pain at all. Any issues are blown out of proportion by AMD fanboys.
If you're on a laptop, installing them is a bit more of a hassle but using the dedicated GPU is an issue that needs to be addressed someday. Essentially, laptops with Nvidia GPUs need to prepend prime-run to every application they want to use the dedicated GPU.
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
its not terrible, it just sucks that its not automatic. i am not on windows and dont want to be treated like i am.
Barring any quirks; for Arch, RHEL, Rocky, Alma, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandrivia, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Void it's as simple as installing nvidia-open. Most other distros its the same, but the package name varies from repository to repository.
Not necessarily a pain to install, however I've had a lot of stupid issues - like not being able to open a TTY session., I can't run Sway, and Hyprland absolutely refuses to work with my 3 monitor setup.
its not difficult
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.
It ranges from "automatic" to "infuriating".
If you have Secure Boot enabled, there are some hoops to jump through. Read the docs and follow the steps for DKMS.
Depending on your distro and your requirements, you might want to install the drivers manually from Nvidia rather than using older drivers from your distro.
If you need CUDA, god help you. Choose a distro that makes this easy and use containers to avoid dependency hell. Note that this is not any easier on Windows (at least not last I checked, which was a few years ago).
Do not follow this advice OP. Never install the drivers manually from Nvidia unless you're an expert and have a very specific reason to go this route.
With Mint, just use the driver manager app and you'll be good.