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.
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.
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.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.
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 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.
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.
no, it was the 565 or 575 i can’t remember, there were older options there too. But regardless, even if removed, it shouldn’t have left apt in a state of panic.
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
Mint runs X11 so it’s quite easier. Under wayland all hell breaks lose on our PC. And that’s with the latest version available by ubuntu too, not some old version.
I’ve run Nvidia with Wayland for years and never encountered a single issue. This sounds like it’s probably just an Ubuntu issue (go figure, there’s a reason the Linux community despises Canonical). It’s worked perfectly fine for me in Fedora and Arch in Wayland, and my distro of choice nowadays is Bazzite, which is based on Fedora.
I can also vouch for PoP_OS!, get the .iso with baked-in nVidia drivers and you will have no problems. The biggest issue I’ve had so far is that sometimes, after updating graphics drivers, FPS get stuck at like ~10 and I need to reboot. But happens rarely, and it takes ten seconds to fix
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.
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.
usually not, it can be kind of a pain when it has issues, but that’s uncommon nowadays.
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.
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.
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.
If the recommendations for Mint do not work, I’d try a different distribution with an easier path to install nvidia drivers, namely one that has the open nvidia drivers included in the ISO.
PopOS and Ubuntu do this.
I’d avoid CachyOS for Linux newbs as it is bleeding edge and can be difficult to manage.
Don’t use the open Nvidia drivers they are not as good. Most people’s problems with Nvidia probably come from this. I recommend bazzite for a Linux newbie, because it installs the best driver automatically and is very easy to use. Just get the distro that’s made for Nvidia with KDE.
That’d work too but booting into game mode first would be a bit of a curve ball for many newbs.
On Nvidia it doesn’t support game mode, so it just boots into the desktop, and also you can download a version that boots directly into the desktop or just tweak the files to make it the default.
Thanks, I didn’t know that.
Nvidia GPU can be troublesome on Linux indeed. Mint might not be the best option in that case. If you are flexible, distro-wise, I cannot recommend Bazzite enough.
You can get an image with all the needed Nvidia drivers and configs, that should bring you the smoothest possible experience with your hardware, especially for gaming!
Good luck!
I like bazzite but why not mint would good option 580 driver already in their repo so what problem at all he can expect
(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 dedicated gpu and not my integrated graphics (cpu), but that was the biggest hurdle
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’re having 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?
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
