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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I use Garuda, you just install the Nvidia version and the updater handles updates automatically whenever you run it.
Easy peasy.
Depends on the distro here is a list based on my experience
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Opensuse: medium-ish
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Fedora: easy (requires a third party repo)
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Linux Mint: Pretty sure easy
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Cachyos/bazzite/nobara Very easy (comes with the distro)
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.
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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.
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.
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-runto every application they want to use the dedicated GPU.I mean blow out of proportion nowadays yes. But this wasn’t the case just a few years ago. We have come such a long way to make it almost a simple click install. But dont forget where we came from.
So their is some truth to it although its mostly outdated now.
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
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.
its not difficult
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.
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.
bazzite is essentially identical
I wouldn’t say that. It is very different in it’s atomic nature, not to mention the pre-packaged software and tweaks.
I meant identical to fedora atomic.
I mean not to be pedantic but there is no “fedora atomic”. There is Fedora Kinoite, Fedora Sway, Fedora Silverblue, etc. Bazzite is just yet another Fedora atomic release.
Actually there was a recent rebrand, https://fedoramagazine.org/introducing-fedora-atomic-desktops/
This isn’t recent, this is over a year old. Also note that “desktops” is plural. As in the ones I listed above make up “Fedora atomic desktops”.
I consider that recent, but… yeah, they’re the fedora atomic desktops. Bazzite is identical to them, you can pick kde or gnome, so it isn’t just kinoite or silverblue, so, atomic is more accurate in this context.
I use mint, and it’s easier than on windows… You open driver manager, tap on the newest driver, click apply. Then restart.
