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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by thingsiplay@kbin.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml

There are many reasons to dislike Nvidia on Linux. Here is a little thing that bugs me all the time, the updates. Normally the system updates would be quick and fast, but with the proprietary drivers of Nvidia involved, it gets quiet slow process. And I am not even talking about any other problem I encounter, just about the updates.

As an Archlinux based system user (EndeavourOS to be precise), I get new Kernel updates all the time. That means every time a new Kernel version is installed, the Nvidia driver DKMS has to be installed too. And that is basically the slowest part. But that's not too bad, even though it's doing this twice for each Kernel I have once.

What's more infuriating is, if you also happen to use Flatpaks for a very few applications. I really don't have many Flatpaks at all. Yet, the Nvidia drivers are installed in 7 versions or what?! And they are full downloads, each 340 MB or more. This takes ages and is the only part that takes long to update Flatpak system. I always do flatpak remove --unused to make sure nothing useless is present. /RANT (EDIT: Just typos corrected.)

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[-] michaelrose@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Why would you need to? Apps might likely need functional drivers for your hardware to exist but most things aren't going to directly relate to or depend on a particular version of the nvidia driver. If it does you might be a bad developer.

[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well the main reason is we target a certain graphics API which Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all support, but driver updates do from time to time have regressions and we have to work with Mesa to fix them.

It's also not just graphics. Our app depends on a certain library version as well, and if you don't use Flatpak, that becomes an issue for some of our users to grab too.

this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
261 points (97.5% liked)

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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