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.
No it just works as long as you install the drivers…
I see what did there… Or I see a blinking cursor 😄
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 2080, I’ve played through half life alyx on mint
but just dual boot, have a fallback windows installOn 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.
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.
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
{ 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”
Oh that’s neat, I’d never heard of it. Using the integrated graphics as well as a PCIE GPU. Cool.
Helps with battery life on laptops
Does the display not need to be plugged into the onboard port, then?
Not exactly sure what you mean by this
On a desktop I might use the integrated graphics as well if I could use its HDMI/DP port for an additional monitor. Since you mentioned a laptop battery, I am guessing that you are choosing to drive the built in display with either the integrated graphics or the Nvidia graphics card built in. Have I misunderstood?
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.
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.
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 :)
