7mo ago

Helping a friend switch- what do I need to know about nvidia graphics in Linux?

I have a friend who I recently learned is looking to switch to Linux and I offered to help, since I've been using Linux for ages. I'm not the most technical user, but in some ways I think that makes me uniquely well suited to be a new person's guide, and I'm pretty familiar with the install and setup process sans one big thing, proprietary graphics drivers, I've generally always been installing Linux on a laptop it an integrated gpu

They let me know they have an nvidia graphics card, I think 30 series if I remember right, we don't know what DE or distro might be a good fit for them and I told them we'd start by test driving a few, see what they thought of the interfaces, and pick a distro from there

Can you boot and use the OS without installing the proprietary drivers, or do you need to install them via like tty or something? I know nvidia started open sourcing their drivers and some amount is in the kernel now, I assume proprietary drivers are still optimal, if not explicitly necessary?

Any and all advice is welcome, it's kinda hard to research something this general and get a sense for what the big picture looks like

Thank you!

14 comments

I don’t see the Linux Mint gang in here yet, so here’s my input.
My work PC is a Dell laptop with an Intel cpu and a discrete nvidia GPU. My home PC is a DIY desktop build with an Intel CPU and a GTX 1080. I have the latest version of Linux Mint Cinnamon running on both.
Mint has a graphical driver manager that lets you switch between the FOSS driver and the official nvidia one. On 2D desktop either choice seems to work fine. I don’t think I’ve tried the FOSS driver in any games yet, but with the nvidia driver installed on my desktop, games with only Windows versions run pretty flawlessly using proton in Steam.
Another consideration with Mint, other than it being full-featured and easier to install than windows, is the popularity of it and the stuff it builds off of like Ubuntu and the apt package management system. It means that whether you are a Linux beginner or an experienced user trying to do something new, any time you google “how to do X in Linux” it is almost certainly going to have instructions relevant to your system.
Not that others are necessarily bad. For example, there’s the known high quality of the Arch wiki if you were thinking of something like EndeavorOS. And with SteamOS going Arch based, I could see such distros being in the majority after a while.
- Yeah, I mentioned to them that if mint has the desktop they want it may be the best choice, thank you for sharing your experience
  
  If they are used to Windows, the default Cinnamon desktop uses the same UI & taskbar layout by default.
  But of course being Linux, you can customize it easily, or start with a different DE version of Mint (there are three) or just install something else. I've tried other DEs with different ways of interacting, like GNOME, but I think that having a single persistent taskbar on one of my monitors is the sweet spot for me.
I’ve been using Bazzite for a few months now on a 40xx card.
Things have been pretty good. Firefox freezes and crashes more than I’d like, sometimes it takes a few tries for apps to open. But overall it’s been fine!
Debian worked fine for me, but I had to switch to X from Wayland because it had problems with getting sick in hibernation. I did install the Nvidia recommended drivers. I play games, screen share, and video meet without issue.
- Are you able to use a distro functionally until you get proprietary drivers installed? Having never been through the process I have no clue what it looks like or how any of it works 😅
  
  Oh yeah, it worked out of the box, and maybe I didn't need to install the nvidia drivers at all except that I play some games and had a few issues with games crashing while starting. I can't say 100% it was the cause, but updating to the proprietary drivers fixed my issue.
To try pop os, they have a separate iso already including all the Nvidia stuff. It works great, rock solid, seamless. (You'll see info about their new cosmic DE, and I think it will eventually be good, but I wouldn't suggest trying it now, especially for a new person. It's not ready for non-enthusiast use, and mixing it with their current Gnome-based DE introduced some small issues for me.)
- Every time I try pop I run into some kind of an issue or another 😅 we may give it a try but my experience has soured me on it a bit
  Mostly I'm just trying to make sure that, whatever they seem to like, I can help them get it up and running without an issue. Only part I'm not confident in is the graphics drivers but it sounds like the answer is that I can use the open source ones, find out what they wanna run, and then follow a tutorial for the proprietary ones once we're settled on a distro and desktop...?
  
  Yeah I think that sounds right. The other mentions of Mint here seem particularly suitable for this situation.

14 comments