I was on arch as a vestige from my school days, having never quite found the time to switch to something more stable. When I saw the news over the weekend, I checked and found 1 would-be-infected package on my machine that was thankfully months out of date. I’m well past the point of wanting to examine PKGBUILDs every time (hence the out of date package). But, instead of just removing AUR packages and sticking to arch repos, I decided to sweep up the technical debt by wiping and installing Fedora. I’m liking it so far, minus the absolute pain in the ass that is Nvidia on Linux. Fuck academics and their insistence on writing everything targeting CUDA; otherwise, I’d have saved a good bit of money a few years ago with a much more compatible AMD card.
The most frictionless distro to install nvidia drivers is Aurora. As you get ready to download the ISO, it will provide a couple of drop down menus to select your gpu. Intel/AMD is one and the other lists nvidia gpu’s by card to add the correct driver to the ISO. You should be able to install the ISO and boot into your shiny new Plasma desktop with your nvidia gpu working just fine.
And you get the atomic goodness of Fedora Kinonite.
Have you looked into drop-in (ZLUDA) or recompile (SCALE, chipStar) things? Though they may not have been helpful with the years gone by (and may each have their own pros/cons).
I’m still using a 1050Ti (and legacy driver shifting to AUR did block me from updating), value doesn’t seem great and not going to buy something used from eBay. So that still complicates things for me.
Distro-wise I probably want something slower than Arch but not sure about point releases. And I am hoping for something that does updates in a way more friendly to slower internet (giving less update friction), but I suspect it doesn’t exist. Some things (OpenSUSE, NixOS) seem like they might be closer to I want but I have hangups about them (Patterns on SUSE and lack of videos for Slowroll, NixOS having multiple solutions for dynamically linked executables especially if I decide to stop using Steam directly).
In the simplest case, absolutely. I ran into black screens and wayland issues due to a combination of needing to enable simpledrm in the command line and working with secure boot. Not too much extra once you figure it out, though.
It’s a couple commands and laid out cookbook style. Fedora has a very good document page on installing nVidia drivers. And the installation is generally very smooth.
The biggest hang up for first time users is understanding that you need to wait for everything to build before doing sudo systemctl reboot. How long do you need to wait? No one really knows. There is no progress bar or any other notification that the building is done successfully. You just wait and then take a leap of faith into that dark abyss and hope for the best.
Typically, it’s recommended to wait “at least 5 minutes”. Maybe more. I always waited around 10 minutes, (or one cup of tea) to be sure. But some users reported needing to wait was much as 20 minutes for everything to build. YMMV
Regarding the wait time, maybe I just got lucky, but just waited for me CPU usage to come back down and spammed modinfo -F version nvidia or some such until it stopped erroring. My actual hang-up was getting simpledrm working and then secure boot.
You add the rpmfusion repo and install a few nvidia packages from there. Kernel modules are then built for the driver. If secure boot is used, they need to be signed too. Sometimes the grub entry isnt updated and doesnt load nvidia drivers. Sometimes you boot into a black screen, sometimes Wayland throws a hissy fit. Hardware accelerated video decoding needs more packages, in browsers it may need extra configuration…
The components are all there and they work, but sometimes the stars don’t align and you just curse a little and wonder why you didn’t just buy AMD because that, just works.
I was on arch as a vestige from my school days, having never quite found the time to switch to something more stable. When I saw the news over the weekend, I checked and found 1 would-be-infected package on my machine that was thankfully months out of date. I’m well past the point of wanting to examine PKGBUILDs every time (hence the out of date package). But, instead of just removing AUR packages and sticking to arch repos, I decided to sweep up the technical debt by wiping and installing Fedora. I’m liking it so far, minus the absolute pain in the ass that is Nvidia on Linux. Fuck academics and their insistence on writing everything targeting CUDA; otherwise, I’d have saved a good bit of money a few years ago with a much more compatible AMD card.
The most frictionless distro to install nvidia drivers is Aurora. As you get ready to download the ISO, it will provide a couple of drop down menus to select your gpu. Intel/AMD is one and the other lists nvidia gpu’s by card to add the correct driver to the ISO. You should be able to install the ISO and boot into your shiny new Plasma desktop with your nvidia gpu working just fine.
And you get the atomic goodness of Fedora Kinonite.
Have you looked into drop-in (ZLUDA) or recompile (SCALE, chipStar) things? Though they may not have been helpful with the years gone by (and may each have their own pros/cons).
I’m still using a 1050Ti (and legacy driver shifting to AUR did block me from updating), value doesn’t seem great and not going to buy something used from eBay. So that still complicates things for me.
Distro-wise I probably want something slower than Arch but not sure about point releases. And I am hoping for something that does updates in a way more friendly to slower internet (giving less update friction), but I suspect it doesn’t exist. Some things (OpenSUSE, NixOS) seem like they might be closer to I want but I have hangups about them (Patterns on SUSE and lack of videos for Slowroll, NixOS having multiple solutions for dynamically linked executables especially if I decide to stop using Steam directly).
Isnt it just a single line command to get nvidia working?
In the simplest case, absolutely. I ran into black screens and wayland issues due to a combination of needing to enable simpledrm in the command line and working with secure boot. Not too much extra once you figure it out, though.
It’s a couple commands and laid out cookbook style. Fedora has a very good document page on installing nVidia drivers. And the installation is generally very smooth.
The biggest hang up for first time users is understanding that you need to wait for everything to build before doing sudo systemctl reboot. How long do you need to wait? No one really knows. There is no progress bar or any other notification that the building is done successfully. You just wait and then take a leap of faith into that dark abyss and hope for the best.
Typically, it’s recommended to wait “at least 5 minutes”. Maybe more. I always waited around 10 minutes, (or one cup of tea) to be sure. But some users reported needing to wait was much as 20 minutes for everything to build. YMMV
Regarding the wait time, maybe I just got lucky, but just waited for me CPU usage to come back down and spammed
modinfo -F version nvidiaor some such until it stopped erroring. My actual hang-up was getting simpledrm working and then secure boot.You add the rpmfusion repo and install a few nvidia packages from there. Kernel modules are then built for the driver. If secure boot is used, they need to be signed too. Sometimes the grub entry isnt updated and doesnt load nvidia drivers. Sometimes you boot into a black screen, sometimes Wayland throws a hissy fit. Hardware accelerated video decoding needs more packages, in browsers it may need extra configuration…
The components are all there and they work, but sometimes the stars don’t align and you just curse a little and wonder why you didn’t just buy AMD because that, just works.
Yep, checklist of basically everything I went through over the weekend. Sorted now, thankfully