Hello all! I’m fairly new to Linux as whole, I made the switch just 3 days ago. I tried searching for the same problem in this forum, but I couldn’t find a similar topic. I’m using Fedora 43 with KDE Plasma.
I am troubled because Flathub (Discover) keeps prompting me to install the drivers I already have installed. I have a Nvidia GPU and have all the drivers installed already. But Flathub prompts me to reinstall them, like so:
When I searched for those drivers, it seems they have already been installed:
Is it safe to reinstall those? How should I go about making this notification go away? Thanks, and sorry for the newbie question. I’m just worried about overwriting my already (working) drivers.
Yes, you need to reinstall them. You have to actually if you want to use flatpak. If you don’t, you will end up woth graphical bugs and instability.
Flatpak is containerized, designed to limit its dependency on the host system, including the graphics drivers. For AMD and Intel cards, this allows them to run newer drivers for flatpak apps than the host system provides. Though that’s not the case when using the proprietary NVIDIA driver, that requires the host and flatpak driver versions to be the same.
flatpaks need to use their own copy of the GPU drivers (I forgot why). So on update, when flatpak sees that your system GPU drivers were updated, flatpak automatically installs a copy of the drivers that matches the new version on your “host” system.
You don’t need to worry. flatpak is installing a separate copy for the flatpaks in your user account, and doesn’t (rather, cannot) mess with the drivers that are installed system-wide (it doesn’t even run with the administrator privileges needed to do that).
