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?

  • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    As long as you don’t make the mistake of downloading them directly from Nvidia, it should be straight-forward.

      • Ulrich@feddit.org
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        3 hours ago

        Some of them have dedicated Nvidia images and you don’t have to do anything (theoretically, this has failed for me before). I had problems with the Nobara image but Bazzite worked flawlessly out of the box.

      • Enkrod@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        depends on your Distro, for Linux Mint it’s just the Driver Manager.

        To access the Driver Manager in Linux Mint, follow these steps:

        1. Click on the Menu (Taskbar) in the lower-left corner of your screen.
        2. Navigate to Administration.
        3. Click on Driver Manager.

        Load Device Manager for Nvidia Drivers on Linux Mint

        Once you have opened the Driver Manager, follow these steps to install the Nvidia drivers:

        1. The Driver Manager will prompt you for your password. Enter your password and click on Authenticate.
        2. The Driver Manager will scan your system for available drivers. Once the scanning is complete, you will see a list of available drivers for your graphics card.
        3. Select the recommended Nvidia driver from the list.
        4. Click on Apply Changes to start the installation process.

        Then reboot.

        source

        For most problems you can really just google stuff like “Linux Mint Nvidia Drivers”

      • Luke@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Whatever distro you pick will have instructions for where and how to install the drivers, if it doesn’t do so for you during the install. Ubuntu is probably most likely to do so easiest. I prefer Fedora for other reasons, which is also easy to get nvidia working, but sightly less easy than Ubuntu where it’s a single checkbox during OS install.

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        If you happen to choose OpenSUSE, the " install recommends " will detect nVidia and load some drivers to get it working, but you can also add a specific repo nVidia hosts for Leap and Tumbleweed and download the Drivers / Cuda etc. They work great, so ignore the previous commentor. Laptops with dual GPU need you to setup a switching app to save power, when you don’t need to power the nVidia. If your BIOS has a discrete graphics mode selection, you can choose hybrid, but if your OS has trouble you can set it to discrete only so nVidia is always used. I had to do this on one machine because the OS saw the two GPUs and was trying to treat them has two displays instead of one composite display choice

      • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Each distro has it’s own way of installing the drivers, Mint uses a driver Manager GUI, endeavour OS uses the nvidia-inst script, but ultimately, they come the repositories of the distro.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      If you are on something like openSUSE, nVidia hosts a repo just for OpenSUSE Leap ams Tumbleweed, and that’s exactly where you get them from, and they work.

      • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        True, but you’re not going the Nvidia website, finding and downloading a .run file, manually installing it, and then manually maintaining it which is what I was talking about.