People often repeat that Nvidia is a nightmare to get working and that you need to install some sort of pre-packaged distro that configures Nvidia for you but… that hasn’t been true for years?
Get any distro you want, from Fedora to Arch, install nvidia-open, reboot… that’s it? Maybe install extra packages for 32 bit support, video decoding and CUDA if you want, optionally. Not different from installing Nvidia drivers on Windows at all, except you’re not running a .exe, but that’s true for any package.
I believe one of the problems is that nvidia is an out of kernel driver so it requires each kernel update to rebuild it. There is a lot of distro’s that handle this with a proper configuration of dkms but some dont and it causes issues that are hard to solve for the average user.
People often repeat that Nvidia is a nightmare to get working and that you need to install some sort of pre-packaged distro that configures Nvidia for you but… that hasn’t been true for years?
Get any distro you want, from Fedora to Arch, install nvidia-open, reboot… that’s it? Maybe install extra packages for 32 bit support, video decoding and CUDA if you want, optionally. Not different from installing Nvidia drivers on Windows at all, except you’re not running a .exe, but that’s true for any package.
I believe one of the problems is that nvidia is an out of kernel driver so it requires each kernel update to rebuild it. There is a lot of distro’s that handle this with a proper configuration of dkms but some dont and it causes issues that are hard to solve for the average user.