I want to make the move to Mint at the end of Win10 in a week or so, but I’ve heard some horror stories about how tough it can be to get Nvidia GPUs working with them. As it is I have a 4060TI and no money for an AMD GPU. If I can’t get my GPU working with Linux I’m probably gonna end up having to stick with Windows untim I can afford an AMD GPU, the thought of which doesn’t exactly excite me.
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
Mint runs X11 so it’s quite easier. Under wayland all hell breaks lose on our PC. And that’s with the latest version available by ubuntu too, not some old version.
I’ve run Nvidia with Wayland for years and never encountered a single issue. This sounds like it’s probably just an Ubuntu issue (go figure, there’s a reason the Linux community despises Canonical). It’s worked perfectly fine for me in Fedora and Arch in Wayland, and my distro of choice nowadays is Bazzite, which is based on Fedora.
Is it possible that the driver that was installed was at some point so old that it was removed from the repos?
I can’t speak about the exact implementation on Ubuntu, but on Fedora (which I am using) the driver usually gets updated to the latest version automatically. If that’s not the case on Ubuntu or Mint, it may be worth going to the device drivers menu every few months, checking if there’s a new one available and selecting the new one if there is one.
no, it was the 565 or 575 i can’t remember, there were older options there too. But regardless, even if removed, it shouldn’t have left apt in a state of panic.