Curious to try a different distro from Pop!_OS but honestly I cringe at the nvidia driver installation instructions.
Fedora, do your self av favor and ship your distro with preinstalled GPU drivers. I know for the (current) majority of Linux users installing drivers is easy and all but once you try a distro that has preinstalled drivers then having to install them manually feels like a PITA and a major hurdle to switch to your distro.
Or at least make a installer tool or something that automates installation so you don’t have to spend 15 minutes just to install something completely essential like GPU drivers.
/rant
EDIT: thanks all for the input. I’ll be sure to check out Nobara
I assume you refer to the proprietary GPU drivers by NVIDIA themselves. Regardless of what their license would allow us to do, including them would go against one of our core foundations: “Freedom”
Additionally, NVIDIA users with the open source nouveau driver should see a significant performance and reliability boost with Mesa 25.1. That’s currently cooking in Rawhide right now, we’ll see how things go over the next couple of months.
It seems to suggest that distribution as part of an OS is ok provided that “the agreement is provided to each software recipient.”
I’m not a lawyer, but I wouldn’t think that a requirement to provide the user with a copy of the agreement means that the user has to choose to perform the install by themself?
Another thing is I agree the nouveau has is useless, most time I won’t use it. But NVIDIA drivermay make some serious display error(Many user said after they install NVIDIA driver there screens are black). Use a stable thing is better, at least you can run GNOME(or kde …)
@birgersp you can also try the Fedora-based Universal Blue images (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora), which come with nvidia drivers pre-installed. Bazzite’s dropdown below:
Try other distros and understand the process. Once you understand the general procedure, installing drivers any distro is straightforward.
Yeah Fedora including NV drivers could benefit by not needing to figure out how to do it and quicker set-up (which I’d argue is a disadvantage to overall Linux understanding, but ). I’d rather not download larger images to entertain this though.
This takes less than 5 minutes:
RPM Fusion
NVIDIA packages
akmods --force (optional)
Reboot and done
The specifics are mostly the same between distros; with Fedora being unique in that you need RPM Fusion’s nonfree repo.
If you want to learn how to do something different, there’s also NVIDIA’s open GPU module without RPM Fusion (my notes).
The proprietary nvidia drivers cannot be shipped (not FLOSS). The open source variants are not integrated upstream (and never will be), so cannot be shipped (and only support a limited number of GPUs).
Everyone agrees that the nvidia situation is less than optimal, and while it will only help with “recent” GPUs, the Nova driver will (finally) address many of the pain points going forward.
If it takes you 15 minutes to install the drivers you may not yet be sufficiently tall to ride the nvidia ride. That is on nvidia for not catering to the people of short stature among us. Go post on the nvidia community boards.
Usually because they have not completed building the drivers.
The screen can be black for 5 minutes while the build runs while booting a new kernel. (Apparetly this had a fix now by preventing a system reboot after a new kernel install.)
). I’d rather not download larger images to entertain this though.