I mean yeah, but that’s a little like saying “computers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.” It’s a pretty large limitation to place on the user’s choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.
It used to be that there was no option at all, on any distro. You’d have the broken proprietary drivers, or the open source reverse engineered one with half the performance and unreliability in specialty features.
Since then Nvidia has shifted focus to get their drivers working properly, and there were also changes making them more open source, tho I’m not sure that’d mean the “proprietary driver” will go full foss at some point.
If op is to be believed, the proprietsry driver is already a lot more stable, so it’s now a software licensing issue not an unfixable technical issue.
Are there distros where you can’t do that? I mean, maybe Debian?
I have had only a few issues with nVidia on Linux for a few years. But, I am using an old card. I’d like to live in the nice sunny castle, not the scary one with bad weather. But, at least I have mostly working shelter while I play my games.
Debian has proprietary software via opt-in through the non-free repository. However the Nvidia driver is horribly outdated so I had to install them directly. But now it works decently well. But my 1070TI is on borrowed time now no matter the OS 🥲
Yeah, I have the same issue with my 1080. I haven’t installed Debian in decades because everything in “stable” is so incredibly outdated. It’s supposed to lead to a stable system, and in some ways it does. But, in other ways because everything is so out of date, people often have to install from source or find alternate packages, so it becomes possibly even more unstable.
I think with flatpak it’s fine nowadays. So I have the stable base Debian, but most applications are flatpak and for dev work I use containers or nix anyways.
Yeah, these days you don’t need the base OS much anymore. That’s why I like the Atomic distros. I’m running Bazzite and it’s great. Someone else handles the upgrades of the base image, and I just run flatpaks or containers.
It has no issues, NVIDIA just works these days (if you use a distro where you can choose to use proprietary drivers for it during installation)
I mean yeah, but that’s a little like saying “computers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.” It’s a pretty large limitation to place on the user’s choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.
It used to be that there was no option at all, on any distro. You’d have the broken proprietary drivers, or the open source reverse engineered one with half the performance and unreliability in specialty features.
Since then Nvidia has shifted focus to get their drivers working properly, and there were also changes making them more open source, tho I’m not sure that’d mean the “proprietary driver” will go full foss at some point.
If op is to be believed, the proprietsry driver is already a lot more stable, so it’s now a software licensing issue not an unfixable technical issue.
Exactly!
Well, no, not at all. Nvida works on wayland on any distro, but it just works on some distros.
It just works means no user config required.
Are there distros where you can’t do that? I mean, maybe Debian?
I have had only a few issues with nVidia on Linux for a few years. But, I am using an old card. I’d like to live in the nice sunny castle, not the scary one with bad weather. But, at least I have mostly working shelter while I play my games.
Debian has proprietary software via opt-in through the non-free repository. However the Nvidia driver is horribly outdated so I had to install them directly. But now it works decently well. But my 1070TI is on borrowed time now no matter the OS 🥲
Yeah, I have the same issue with my 1080. I haven’t installed Debian in decades because everything in “stable” is so incredibly outdated. It’s supposed to lead to a stable system, and in some ways it does. But, in other ways because everything is so out of date, people often have to install from source or find alternate packages, so it becomes possibly even more unstable.
I think with flatpak it’s fine nowadays. So I have the stable base Debian, but most applications are flatpak and for dev work I use containers or nix anyways.
Yeah, these days you don’t need the base OS much anymore. That’s why I like the Atomic distros. I’m running Bazzite and it’s great. Someone else handles the upgrades of the base image, and I just run flatpaks or containers.
I think there are some that only install FOSS during initial installation
Like which ones?
OpenSuse, I think