2mo ago

Is it so hard to get Nvidia GPUs working with Linux?

I want to make the move to Mint at the end of Win10 in a week or so, but I've heard some horror stories about how tough it can be to get Nvidia GPUs working with them. As it is I have a 4060TI and no money for an AMD GPU. If I can't get my GPU working with Linux I'm probably gonna end up having to stick with Windows untim I can afford an AMD GPU, the thought of which doesn't exactly excite me.

102 comments

I've used Nvidia GPUs with Linux with not many problems. These "horror stories" typically come from people who try to install a driver exactly the same way they would on Windows (by going to the Nvidia website and downloading something) whereas on most Linux distros it's actually much easier.
On Mint, you basically just have to open the "driver manager" and click on the recommended Nvidia driver. Then reboot. :)
There is also a guide available on It's FOSS.
- Not true. Ubuntu's official nvidia driver installation broke twice for my husband's PC, one other time they removed a version completely from their list (while we had installed it), and then it had orphaned packages and apt was constantly complaining, while every time we put nvidia as the main card (instead of the integrated intel), the PC does not wake up from sleep under Wayland (while it does under X11, so we know it's not a BIOS issue).
  Also, the Mint forum is full of problems with nvidia drivers, despite running under X11, which is the "easier" environment for its drivers.
  Overall, it's a nightmare, and that's why we now use the integrated intel as the main gpu, and the nvidia for compute only (for blender and resolve).
  Maybe it's better implemented under Arch-land and Fedora-land, but under Ubuntu/Mint/Debian-land, it's still a nightmare.
  
  Idk, I've run mint for a decade or more. Until the last couple of years all of my machines have had nvidia gpus. I never had an issue with drivers.
  So, yes, you are more likely to run into issues if you have an nvidia gpu but it's still pretty unlikely
  
  Is it possible that the driver that was installed was at some point so old that it was removed from the repos?
  I can't speak about the exact implementation on Ubuntu, but on Fedora (which I am using) the driver usually gets updated to the latest version automatically. If that's not the case on Ubuntu or Mint, it may be worth going to the device drivers menu every few months, checking if there's a new one available and selecting the new one if there is one.
- I have been dual-booting Arch and Debian with an NVidua Gforce-759 Ti since say, 2015 and had several problems, in spite of having an otherwise totally vanilla PC system:
  in Arch, automatic compile of kernel module on update not working
  updates breaking grub because of missing kernel modules
  Arch no longer booting after an Debian upgrade
  Wayland in Debian not working properly.
  Provlems with running Arch in VMs.
  Guix System not supported.
  Yes, all that was solvable with some effort, and with experience from 25 years of using Linux.
  So, in sum it was perhaps costing one full week, or ten days time.
  But I decided that all that hassle and breakage was simply not worth my time, and swapped the card for an AMD Radeon.
  No problems since.
  The morale is: If you want to use Linux, make sure you use fully supported hardware, with open source drivers from the main kernel. Including laptops.
  Everything else is probably not worth the time.
  .
  
  Not sure why you would have so much trouble with a DKMS module in Arch. But having to manage out-of-tree modules is an issue. Thankfully NVIDIA does not have that issue anymore as they now use in-tree modules (as of driver release 580). Arch is shipping those drivers now so others will not experience your pain.
  Debian ships really old drivers. So NVDiA problems should still be expected on Debian, especially on Wayland.
  problems with running Arch in VMs
  I do not see what that has to do with NVIDIA. Sounds like you may have just had issues with Arch.

I have a RTX 3060 and just installed the proprietary driver on Arch with pacman and that was it.

The horror stories often come from years ago, when Linux wasn't as under-friendly as it is now. You shouldn't have any problems with this.
And if Mint does give you problems (which I doubt), consider trying a plug-and-play gaming distro like bazzite. It supports nvidia GPUs right away.
https://bazzite.gg/
- Thing is, I want to use my PC for more than just gaming, so I figured a gaming-focused distro might get in the way when I want to do non-gaming stuff.
  
  No you can pretty much do everything the same. The biggest difference is the distro it's based on, bazzite is based on fedora, you use "sudo rpm-ostree install" to install packages. Fedora has a system where it layers packages onto an ostree so if you have an issue you can boot from an old one.
  Rpm is only needed for system packages, most packages can just be installed via a flatpack in the package store, which is all free and open source software.
  Bazzite is a great starting point. It is pretty much turn key, while having the best performance and proprietary drivers. It already has everything installed to get emulating windows apps working easily out of the box. Wine, proton, steam, the proprietary drivers. These are all things you are going to want probably and this will save you a headache and several days of trying to get the system setup.
  Make sure you disable UEFI and choose legacy boot in your bios if it's available and also disable the TPM in the bios if available. It will work with those enabled, but it's buggier and the TPM causes performance issues. Linux doesn't need these and they are artificially imposed by Microsoft and the big corporate OSes, but they suck compared to the original simple standards for bootstrapping. I'm not 100% sure how well this works on everything. It's possible some newer cards might require UEFI boot, but you can just turn it back on before you install.
  I recommend KDE as the desktop environment, especially if you are used to windows. It will feel the most natural and familiar to you. I also recommend asking chatGPT to help you with basic tasks like installing system level software. Make sure you specify that you are using bazzite. Once you learn to use Linux its so much better than Windows. The performance is much better in nearly every regard. You can do anything you want with Linux, where windows is extremely locked down nowadays. It also prolongs the life of your hardware, especially drives, since windows spyware isn't constantly scanning your files and stuff. With proton you will likely see a 5-15% performance jump over gaming on windows natively. The downside is that many popular games won't work in multiplayer because of the anti heat, and also some trash software like Photoshop won't work, but the vast majority of windows apps will work just fine, even multiplayer. The developers have to go out of their way to make multiplayer games not work on Linux, so it's pretty rare, even if many of the bigger studios do it. You can dual boot windows for this if you really want to, but windows will constantly try to screw up your boot and stuff so you have to be careful. I would say just not support those companies which go out of their way to not support Linux. They are anticompetitive and anti consumer.
  The learning curve for Linux isn't quite a cliff now, it's still steep, but with bazzite it's much easier then it ever has been. It mostly just works from a simple gui install, and there isn't really anything you need outside of this base install. Perhaps you want to install, protonup-qt so you can install proton GE, which has better support for some games that rely heavily on .net code, like space engineers.
  
  At their heart, most distros are approximately "made of the same stuff". There's differences in package management in the background (e.g. how the "software centre" works), but essentially the difference between a "gaming distro", "normal distro" and "creative distro" is just what programs are installed by default, and how a few things are set up by default.
  Nothing stops me playing games on Mint (and historically, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio) - and likewise, nothing will stop you installing office programs, audio/video/graphics programs etc on something presented as a gaming distro.
  
  It depends on the distro. Bazzite might get in the way since it's a more closed distro if you want to do docker stuff. I personally managed but setting up extra hard drives that docker (podman) uses, but it was tricky. You'll not have issue browsing the Web or installing most apps though.
  Nobara might be a good choice although the user base is not that big so you might have to migrate in a couple of years.
  Otherwise I'd stick to regular distros since they have great support and will stick around for a long time such as Fedora or Kubuntu. I've also heard Endavour is really good these days.
  You should consider choosing a distro based on the Wayland integration since you can get HDR fractional scaling and variable refresh rate with them.
  
  That depends on what that other stuff is. Bazzite is a desktop OS first, gaming second. But it us atomic, so installing apps that aren't available as a flatpak is somewhat more complicated.
  Mint is a great start though, I seriously doubt that you will have problems. Just don't be afraid to experiment.

The issues with Nvidia GPU's has been blown up way to much in the last few years in my opinion.
The potential problems you "might" face are:
Not backing up your system before updating
Using too old or too new a kernel version (Older versions may break or cause issue with newer drivers and bleeding edge kernels may introduce issues that weren't caught during QA) * Always have a LTS kernel installed as well as a newer supported kernel
Using brand new hardware too soon (aka don't expect a newly released card to work perfectly day one)
Trying to use GPU's in edge case uses or pushing the envelope without knowing what you are doing
Not backing up your system
Trying to use the wrong kind of card for your needs (A Quadro card isn't going to work well as a RTX card)
Not updating your system (Nvidia drivers get regular updates)
For most major distros now a days you either select the Nvidia option when installing (like Manjaro) or install the drivers afterwards (Ubuntu based) and be off to the races.
Set up and use Timeshift, make a backup before installing updates and you can roll back if there is an issue.

It will work. Under Linux mint for example you can use the firmware installer to install the correct Nvidia driver.
Too bad nvidia drivers are proprietary, so it's not part the default kernel drivers. That is why I like AMD so much more, it has open sourcer drivers. Fk nvidia 😁
- Then playing games you will of course need wine or Proton in case of windows games.
  For native Linux games it's the best thing. Ideally have a game that supports vulkan for the best performance. Or opengl.

It's not, today it works flawlessly, every distro has a simple way to install the proprietary drivers. It's just stories from people repeating a very old song that has no anchor in today's reality.

I recently installed Mint on my PC with my 4090, it works fine, just use the driver manager to install the latest proprietary driver for your gpu and reboot :)

No it just works as long as you install the drivers...
- I see what did there.. Or I see a blinking cursor 😄

If you want the easiest experience possible with Nvidia, I'd recommend Bazzite (and go with the KDE Plasma version). It comes with everything preinstalled and consistent across installations. Plus, it's a tank when it comes to stability; very hard to break it due to the atomic nature. Just install everything through the built in store and you'll be fine. Installing programs is much easier than Windows in Linux due to easy software stores. Bazzite currently uses Bazaar as its software store.

It wasn't for me on Debian 12/13. I just had to add the repo for the drivers and run 1 or 2 lines of bash and I've been good ever since with my 3090.
- Most distros do not require the extra repos. For Debian though, you do. The ones shipped with the distro, even Debian 13, are too old and have problems.

I used Linux Mint and GTX 2070 for over a half a year without any major problems. Installation was incredibly easy as there was a dialog box asking to install drivers and everything just worked. I have 4 monitor setup even.
Ultimately I switched to AMD (last week) because of the tiny problems that I experienced but mostly because I wanted to support AMD and could reason for an GPU upgrade.

Nvidia historically didn't invest in Linux drivers.
Things have gotten a bit better, but there are still plenty of issues with Wayland compatibility specifically.
Install the proprietary driver and it will work, but under Wayland you may have issues with resuming from sleep, stacked transparency, fractional resolution scaling, and HDR compatibility.

I was going to say you'll probably be fine, but if you're considering Mint you'll definitely be fine.
Terminology you don't need to know: Mint is still using x11, which Nvidia works fine with. I assume mint won't switch to Wayland until it works smoothly on Nvidia too.
My partner is using mint on a 3080. I think she had one graphical bug in one game one time after an update. Mint has a program specifically used to roll back to a past Nvidia driver. She chose the driver from before the update, rebooted, and the bug was gone. Just gotta remember to switch back to using latest later when a new driver comes out.

On Nixos haven’t had any issues. I did have issues getting the dynamic GPU thing going through. That’s a bit of a technical challenge at-least on Nixos
- What's a dynamic GPU?
  Yeah it was dead simple on Nixos. I just grabbed the Nvidia section of the wiki. https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/NVIDIA
  undefined
  
  { hardware = { # Renamed from opengl.enable graphics.enable = true; # Most Wayland compositors need this nvidia.modesetting.enable = true; nvidia.powerManagement.enable = false; nvidia.open = false; nvidia.nvidiaSettings = true; };
  
  Sorry it’s called “hybrid graphics”

Got Pop OS with Nvidia's driver packages and it worked like a charm. And of course updating can be done through the package manager. No problems whatsoever, at least for me.

On modern versions of common distros, it'll probably work just fine if you install the driver from your distro's repos. Don't touch NVIDIA's downloadable .run installer.
It's getting better for Nvidia support on Linux, but there's more edge case problems than with AMD or Intel graphics.

No. I have a RTX 3050 Ti Laptop which I have not had many issues with. The biggest issue I have experienced was that a game completely froze at the same point every time. This was due to a regression in their drivers. They spent their sweet time fixing it to, and following the issue thread highlights one of the main issues with their drivers being non-free: extremely competent users providing logs and effort to troubleshoot, but unable to work on the fix themselves. And what seemed to be summer interns replying once in a while and nothing happening for a long while.
But that said, I find the hate overblown. You could get tge impression that running Linux on a machine with an Nvidia-GPU will instantly burn down your house or spawn a portal to hell. It will not. I will get an AMD card at the next crossroads, but I am not ditching my card now just because it is Nvidia. It works fine enough.

I thought the title was "Why is it so hard to get Nvidia working with Linux" but I was mistaken. That's the answer.
[Linus_Saying_FU_Nvidia.mkv]

Older graphics cards (like mine in a laptop bought in 2014) were not supported by Nvidia except through the open source one. So the performance would be sub par.

My Rtx3060 works perfectly, one small error with waking from sleep, which was easily resolved, performance is better than windows, had no trouble getting games running
- I'm new to Linux and have the same card. Running Ubuntu Studio the new 580 driver freezes my application menu. What driver are you using? I tried 570 and it worked for everything except it wouldn't show video on Davinci Resolve so no go for me. I went back to 550 which works for everything except my taskbar freezes multiple times per day and I have to restart plasma each time.
  
  I'm running the 570 open kernel I don't use DaVinci resolve so couldn't tell you if it was working for me or not
  
  Have you had a look at journalctl to see what's actually failing when your taskbar freezes?
  
  I have issues with Ubuntu based distros and my Nvidia card, Arch based seems to work great though. Don't ask me why lol, I'm just getting back into Linux and still learning but that was my experience.

No, it should work out of the box through the open source driver. But, for most people the Nvidia driver (closed) works without issues, you need to install it through driver manager app.

i've never had any problems with em.

I've been trying different flavors on my machines with Nvidia cards. It usually just works well enough for me. Did Garuda for a microsecond, mint for a moment, Ubuntu for a few, and am now trying Debian and Endeavour. I've honestly had more issues coming from arch peculiarities than from nvidia. Just give it a go if you have the drive space. It seems like there's more of a question of how well your chosen flavor meshes with your chosen hardware than one of 'can I even get this working?'

There should be no trouble getting it to work, there may however be a slight chance of it breaking on an update, at least with some rolling distros, if you use the proprietary drivers, which you'll want to use it you care about performance.
The drivers need to be compatible with the kernel. In rare cases a kernel update will not be compatible with the nvidia driver and could get installed before the nvidia update has dropped. This is possible for openSUSE Tumbleweed for example because the nvidia drivers come from an nvidia managed repo that can get behind the official repos. Just being conservative about waiting a few days before applying kernel updates, especially for a significant version change, and checking the forums for people having problem is enough to avoid this problem.

Currently have 2 machines on MX with nvidia cards. One was flawless from the get go the other took some trail and error by installing some extra packages but I got there.
(Through the package manager I might add, no files edited or anything)
Mint has a somewhat similar user experience. Chances are you’ll be just fine. Try out a live usb.

mint, pop os works with my rtx 2060, I've played through half life alyx on mint
but just dual boot, have a fallback windows install

Im using a 3080, nobara and bazzite have worked flawlessly for me so far though im semi active in the bazzite community and a few people have varying issues with nvidia from what ive seen. Usually the issues are a little more edge case like game streaming but with a particular set up

Its pretty straightforward. You just need to have secureboot disabled in bios so a third party driver can load.
- you can boot with secure boot on. To do this you have to enrol MOK keys.
  
  Oh, good to know. I had no idea this was a thing.

Best you can so is test it for yourself.
I switched to Linux Mint in February and my 4070 has given me no issues.
I just had to set some configs in steam so that it defaults to using my 4070 and not my iGPU, and the rest just worked

Honestly it isn't much of a problem anymore, whether you choose a gaming specific OS or not.
Here's how to get good Nvidia support on Fedora 43:
For the driver:
sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
For CUDA support:
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
Then reboot and you're done.
https://github.com/devangshekhawat/Fedora-43-Post-Install-Guide?tab=readme-ov-file#nvidia-drivers

I have multiple linux computers, from servers to a surface tablet, i am able to use all different generations of all nvidia, both permanently installed, and eGPU. It is not without any issue, but it works and is usable.
For me issues stem from x11 vs wayland (work computer is ubuntu due to company policy), or egpu shenanigans which I feel is platform agnostic

My main workstation runs Debian and has a 3090. No issues that I'm aware of. When I used to use Mint, I think I remember Mint having a GUI to easily select the Nvidia driver you want to use, so it was very easy. In Debian, you just have to run ~10 commands in shell to install the proprietary Nvidia driver. I have an older laptop with an Nvidia GPU too; that one is more annoying because I don't think any distro supports integrated/dedicated GPU auto-switching (I just have it set to use the Nvidia GPU all the time).

It sorta depends. I've personally had some issues with certain software (mainly Firefox) running in Wayland on my Nvidia card. There are environment variables and flags to remedy some issues, but I'd still get the occasional application crash.
What worked well for me was setting up prime offloading so basically all of the system runs on the integrated GPU and only games run on Nvidia.

A few years ago when I went to actually use the GPU in my laptop I realized I never installed the drivers. I think it was a 3050 or something pretty low end.
It took maybe 20 minutes, most of that time was waiting for things to install. I've heard the horror stories so I wasn't excepting it to work and was ready to give up at the first sign on resistance but there really wasn't any. That was on Fedora, a bit later I switched to Debian and I remember running into an issue getting it to work but it was small enough that I don't remember what the issue was.

On EndeavourOS, you just have to run nvidia-inst. Mint has the driver manager, and other distros have ways of handling it. For your card, you'll want the Nvidia Open driver if it doesn't do it automatically.
TLDR: These days it's easy.

Lofs of distros such as Bazzite, Nobara, CachyOS all have premade nvidia ISOs avaliable making it easy to jump ship.
Nobara has a fantastic driver manager and system updater

A 4060ti has been out long enough that you're fine with basically any main stream distro.
I think even the 50 series is fine now with most mainstream distros as well.
I still prefer arch based distros now for Nvidia cards and honestly, Fedora is great!

(Not mint)* On arch i used the arch install script, selected the nvidia drivers, and it just worked. I did have to spend some time making sure sure my nvidia gpu was my primary gpu and not my integrated graphics (cpu), but that was the biggest hurdle

RTX5070 works almost straight out from the box on Kubuntu stable. Had to try few of the drivers from the built-in utility to find which worked, but the latest version and open one did the trick. So no, it wasn't hard to get it working properly :)

The complaints are more about lack of support for OS drivers. If using proprietary drivers is not a worry. Then they are fine. Often the OS stuff works if your set up is simple.
My advice. Do not upgrade to quickly. They tend to have errors in their new proprietary drivers. Watch and see how others have done. Before upgrading essential machines.
The other issue. For non rendering. Their latest models performance to £$ etc is getting very bad. But blender still has major speed advantages on Nvidia. But that is looking more and more short term as blender grows.

I've had a couple of computers with Nvidia cards and all I ever had to do was install the driver from the package manager and reboot. I always had screen tearing issues with them, but that was with cards from 2011 & 2013. I would hope that they've fixed that by now.

It's easy to install nVidia drivers nowadays. The real issues will be using them. Maybe I just got a bad card, but maybe nVidia is actual garbage. I don't know.

With some certain distros, it is easy.
- Any distro in the last decade even worth the time to use it's easy.
  The only expectation is if it's a distro purely built to only use Foss software with out expections.
  
  Debian is still a problem

RTX 2080 Ti and CachyOS (Arch-based distro with an emphasis on gaming performance), most everything that should works out-of-the-box. I wouldn't stress it, try a live USB first. Edit: also I'm using Wayland, which has been worse with NVIDIA than X11 that Mint apparently uses. So I'm pretty confident you'll be alright.

I just had to install the NVIDIA proprietor drivers from Software on Fedora and reboot and it worked no problem. NVIDIA also has better software support for ML, so you're fortunate to have an NVIDIA card.

No, it’s not hard. By default open source drivers will run, but you can install the nvidia ones through driver manager and everything should just work.

The main difference is your mileage may vary with Nvidia, whereas it's pretty much always just going to work with AMD. But give it a shot and see how it goes. Make sure to choose a distro that specifically supports Nvidia.
I imagine a 4060TI is a relatively valuable card that you could trade for AMD if you really wanted to.

the ONLY issues I've ever had with my Nvidia GPU were with A. Sway and B. Mint.
and when I say "issues" with Sway it was simply not being able to use a DM to login to it and having to login via TTY with "sway --unsupported-gpu" since the Sway devs aren't fans of proprietary stuff at all.
for Mint...just didn't work well for gaming. Crashing, slow downs, etc. That could either be a Distro issue or a Me issue as Mint was my first linux distro and I only stuck with it for a couple weeks before moving on to CachyOS.
On every distro since then? zero issues. it just works. Best experience with it was probably via CachyOS or NixOS. Runs smooth as silk on NixOS.

Check my history but basically no. It's not so hard.
I'm on Debian stable yet place the latest games, from VR to flat ones, from AAA to indies, and it just works.
Maybe I spent 30min https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers months ago (years now? time flies) when I did my install and since then smooth sailing. I have minor issues, e.g. suspend sometimes hang. Sometimes coming back from sustain some visual glitches in the browser via WebGL, but that's it.
Edit: I sometimes also use the GPU for CUDA for local AI/LLM (mostly to make sure it's bullshit, and it is but at least I can say I tried) and that also went well, just followed instructions.

This is the biggest hurdle nowadays with Nvidia:
NVIDIA GPUs generally experience a performance penalty when running DirectX 12 games on Linux, with reports indicating a drop of 15-30% compared to Windows. This is largely attributed to driver optimizations and the overhead from using translation layers like Proton and Wine.
- To be clear, these are game problems, not NVDIA GPU problems. Some games only work on Windows and need to use a translation wrapper, which has overhead.
  
  To be clear, AMD has much less performance loss if any. In some cases surpassing the performance in Windows on those same games.
  So is it the game's fault? Mostly no. The performance gap is not due to poorly written games, it's about:
  how efficiently DX12 gets translated to Vulkan
  how optimized the Vulkan driver is for gaming
  how much driver-level work is done per platform
  Games that are poorly optimized on Windows will also mostly likely perform badly on Linux.

If you just want to do pedestrian activities like gaming and desktop stuff, you're fine with the average nvidia driver install tutorial, and it's pretty trivial.
If you want more niche or advanced features like HDR tuning in Wayland or using cuda applications, you may want to consider that amd drivers are actually open and allow you to get into those kinds of tunables.
That said, there are still features and performance kept away from the user with nvidia, despite their never-ending promises of making drivers open, and nvidia has been rewarded for being not open on Linux, which a lot of us don't like. I personally am one of those and my stance with nvidia is partly one of principle.

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