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…
Its pretty straightforward. You just need to have secureboot disabled in bios so a third party driver can load.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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 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]
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 installWith some certain distros, it is easy.
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.
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).
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
usually not, it can be kind of a pain when it has issues, but that’s uncommon nowadays.
Yes if you want to do anything non-trivial. I switched to AMD because of how much of a pain it is to use nvidia in Linux. IIRC Wayland literally has a hidden option that says
--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia.
