This has never been an issue. Nothing stops any distro from installing the DKMS drivers at install time. You also have the nouveau driver that can be installed by default if you don’t want to ask users to agree to Nvidia’s license for proprietary driver use.
So, it’s just the philosophy of FOSS stopping distros from using proprietary?
I’m not sure what distro you’ve used that was unable to install Nvidia drivers as part of the general OS install process, but it would have been due to needing the user to agree to the proprietary driver’s EULA.
I’m using Mint. It doesn’t install proprietary Nvidia drivers along the system install. But provides a slick Driver manager where you download proprietary Drivers without any hassle. It does include nouveau during install though.
You also have the nouveau driver that can be installed by default…
And pretty soon, NVK!
Never heard of that one. NVK is a brand new open source driver that uses features of the RTX series to reverse engineer Nvidia drivers. According to the project team, those features make it much easier than before, but it limits the scope to RTX series cards and onward.
NVK is already usable, performancr isn’t 100% of the proprietary driver but I play Overwatch on NVK at 165FPS on my RTX3070 laptop a lot, low settings but very playable. This is with an Optimus configuration (VRR Freesync panel on AMD iGPU) in GNOME Wayland.
But apparently people always had issues with NVidia graphics cards on Linux, no matter what driver it is. And the fact that even Mint and Ubuntu don’t install the drivers by default tells that there indeed are some legal issues with it.
What kind of issues do they have? I’ve used gtx970, 1080, rtx3080 and now 3090 and I’ve never had any issues worth mentioning.
I had all kinds of issues with my 1080 Ti that eventually prompted me to “downgrade” to a 5700XT.
Artefacts, distro updates breaking my system because the graphics driver didn’t like it, stuttering, crashes, flickering, extremely poor Wayland support. It made me hate using my PC to be honest.
By all accounts with the newest driver it’s basically all resolved, and I’m glad to see Nvidia is finally taking steps to open up their graphics stack, so we’re headed in a good direction
…but people really aren’t lying when they’ve been saying Nvidia’s Linux support has been substandard.
Ubuntu is also stale old software, and shouldn’t be a distro anyone wanting a functional box running new hardware/software should use. Valve realized this and moved SteamOS to Arch so they would have a current stack not constantly 6+ months behind upstream, needing to backport everything to an outdated stack.
Lol, WTF are you talking about? Every bit of this is ignorant. Let me correct you so you’re not running around embarrassing yourself:
- SteamOS was based on Debian. Never had anything to do with Ubuntu. The reason they switched was because it was easier to use an Arch build system to make their own base OS image immutable, but still build native modules to include as well as BSP drivers. Simple.
- Ubuntu is the most widely used base of Linux on the planet, desktop and cloud included.
- Valve writes their own modules for their drivers. This is the dumbest thing you’ve asserted so far in that Ubuntu somehow is responsible for drivers. Because you seem to know nothing about Linux in general, I’ll just let you know the kernel handles the detection and loading of modules and drivers. Any distro on 6.8 has the same ability to detect and load drivers for any other distro running 6.8. I have no idea why you thought this had something to do with packaging in distros lolz.
- Do you know what a backport is? It seems you do not.
Anyway, your entire understanding of how everything works is wrong. You should read more.
