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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
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.
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
I have a RTX 3060 and just installed the proprietary driver on Arch with pacman and that was it.
The horror stories often come from years ago, when Linux wasn't as under-friendly as it is now. You shouldn't have any problems with this.
And if Mint does give you problems (which I doubt), consider trying a plug-and-play gaming distro like bazzite. It supports nvidia GPUs right away.
Thing is, I want to use my PC for more than just gaming, so I figured a gaming-focused distro might get in the way when I want to do non-gaming stuff.
No you can pretty much do everything the same. The biggest difference is the distro it's based on, bazzite is based on fedora, you use "sudo rpm-ostree install" to install packages. Fedora has a system where it layers packages onto an ostree so if you have an issue you can boot from an old one.
Rpm is only needed for system packages, most packages can just be installed via a flatpack in the package store, which is all free and open source software.
Bazzite is a great starting point. It is pretty much turn key, while having the best performance and proprietary drivers. It already has everything installed to get emulating windows apps working easily out of the box. Wine, proton, steam, the proprietary drivers. These are all things you are going to want probably and this will save you a headache and several days of trying to get the system setup.
Make sure you disable UEFI and choose legacy boot in your bios if it's available and also disable the TPM in the bios if available. It will work with those enabled, but it's buggier and the TPM causes performance issues. Linux doesn't need these and they are artificially imposed by Microsoft and the big corporate OSes, but they suck compared to the original simple standards for bootstrapping. I'm not 100% sure how well this works on everything. It's possible some newer cards might require UEFI boot, but you can just turn it back on before you install.
I recommend KDE as the desktop environment, especially if you are used to windows. It will feel the most natural and familiar to you. I also recommend asking chatGPT to help you with basic tasks like installing system level software. Make sure you specify that you are using bazzite. Once you learn to use Linux its so much better than Windows. The performance is much better in nearly every regard. You can do anything you want with Linux, where windows is extremely locked down nowadays. It also prolongs the life of your hardware, especially drives, since windows spyware isn't constantly scanning your files and stuff. With proton you will likely see a 5-15% performance jump over gaming on windows natively. The downside is that many popular games won't work in multiplayer because of the anti heat, and also some trash software like Photoshop won't work, but the vast majority of windows apps will work just fine, even multiplayer. The developers have to go out of their way to make multiplayer games not work on Linux, so it's pretty rare, even if many of the bigger studios do it. You can dual boot windows for this if you really want to, but windows will constantly try to screw up your boot and stuff so you have to be careful. I would say just not support those companies which go out of their way to not support Linux. They are anticompetitive and anti consumer.
The learning curve for Linux isn't quite a cliff now, it's still steep, but with bazzite it's much easier then it ever has been. It mostly just works from a simple gui install, and there isn't really anything you need outside of this base install. Perhaps you want to install, protonup-qt so you can install proton GE, which has better support for some games that rely heavily on .net code, like space engineers.
At their heart, most distros are approximately "made of the same stuff". There's differences in package management in the background (e.g. how the "software centre" works), but essentially the difference between a "gaming distro", "normal distro" and "creative distro" is just what programs are installed by default, and how a few things are set up by default.
Nothing stops me playing games on Mint (and historically, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio) - and likewise, nothing will stop you installing office programs, audio/video/graphics programs etc on something presented as a gaming distro.
The issues with Nvidia GPU's has been blown up way to much in the last few years in my opinion.
The potential problems you "might" face are:
For most major distros now a days you either select the Nvidia option when installing (like Manjaro) or install the drivers afterwards (Ubuntu based) and be off to the races.
Set up and use Timeshift, make a backup before installing updates and you can roll back if there is an issue.
It will work. Under Linux mint for example you can use the firmware installer to install the correct Nvidia driver.
Too bad nvidia drivers are proprietary, so it's not part the default kernel drivers. That is why I like AMD so much more, it has open sourcer drivers. Fk nvidia 😁
Then playing games you will of course need wine or Proton in case of windows games.
For native Linux games it's the best thing. Ideally have a game that supports vulkan for the best performance. Or opengl.
I recently installed Mint on my PC with my 4090, it works fine, just use the driver manager to install the latest proprietary driver for your gpu and reboot :)
It's not, today it works flawlessly, every distro has a simple way to install the proprietary drivers. It's just stories from people repeating a very old song that has no anchor in today's reality.
If you want the easiest experience possible with Nvidia, I'd recommend Bazzite (and go with the KDE Plasma version). It comes with everything preinstalled and consistent across installations. Plus, it's a tank when it comes to stability; very hard to break it due to the atomic nature. Just install everything through the built in store and you'll be fine. Installing programs is much easier than Windows in Linux due to easy software stores. Bazzite currently uses Bazaar as its software store.
Got Pop OS with Nvidia's driver packages and it worked like a charm. And of course updating can be done through the package manager. No problems whatsoever, at least for me.
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;
};
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.
I used Linux Mint and GTX 2070 for over a half a year without any major problems. Installation was incredibly easy as there was a dialog box asking to install drivers and everything just worked. I have 4 monitor setup even.
Ultimately I switched to AMD (last week) because of the tiny problems that I experienced but mostly because I wanted to support AMD and could reason for an GPU upgrade.
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.
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.
I was going to say you'll probably be fine, but if you're considering Mint you'll definitely be fine.
Terminology you don't need to know: Mint is still using x11, which Nvidia works fine with. I assume mint won't switch to Wayland until it works smoothly on Nvidia too.
My partner is using mint on a 3080. I think she had one graphical bug in one game one time after an update. Mint has a program specifically used to roll back to a past Nvidia driver. She chose the driver from before the update, rebooted, and the bug was gone. Just gotta remember to switch back to using latest later when a new driver comes out.
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]
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.
i've never had any problems with em.
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.
My Rtx3060 works perfectly, one small error with waking from sleep, which was easily resolved, performance is better than windows, had no trouble getting games running
I'm new to Linux and have the same card. Running Ubuntu Studio the new 580 driver freezes my application menu. What driver are you using? I tried 570 and it worked for everything except it wouldn't show video on Davinci Resolve so no go for me. I went back to 550 which works for everything except my taskbar freezes multiple times per day and I have to restart plasma each time.
I'm running the 570 open kernel I don't use DaVinci resolve so couldn't tell you if it was working for me or not
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.
The complaints are more about lack of support for OS drivers. If using proprietary drivers is not a worry. Then they are fine. Often the OS stuff works if your set up is simple.
My advice. Do not upgrade to quickly. They tend to have errors in their new proprietary drivers. Watch and see how others have done. Before upgrading essential machines.
The other issue. For non rendering. Their latest models performance to £$ etc is getting very bad. But blender still has major speed advantages on Nvidia. But that is looking more and more short term as blender grows.
There should be no trouble getting it to work, there may however be a slight chance of it breaking on an update, at least with some rolling distros, if you use the proprietary drivers, which you'll want to use it you care about performance.
The drivers need to be compatible with the kernel. In rare cases a kernel update will not be compatible with the nvidia driver and could get installed before the nvidia update has dropped. This is possible for openSUSE Tumbleweed for example because the nvidia drivers come from an nvidia managed repo that can get behind the official repos. Just being conservative about waiting a few days before applying kernel updates, especially for a significant version change, and checking the forums for people having problem is enough to avoid this problem.
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
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.
Lofs of distros such as Bazzite, Nobara, CachyOS all have premade nvidia ISOs avaliable making it easy to jump ship.
Nobara has a fantastic driver manager and system updater
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
I've had a couple of computers with Nvidia cards and all I ever had to do was install the driver from the package manager and reboot. I always had screen tearing issues with them, but that was with cards from 2011 & 2013. I would hope that they've fixed that by now.
A 4060ti has been out long enough that you're fine with basically any main stream distro.
I think even the 50 series is fine now with most mainstream distros as well.
I still prefer arch based distros now for Nvidia cards and honestly, Fedora is great!
(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 primary gpu and not my integrated graphics (cpu), but that was the biggest hurdle