It really depends on how the distro you’re using is integrating them and while installing them is usually the easy part, working around certain quirks they come with can be a bit tedious in my experience.

The proprietary driver comes in binary form and is shipped with a small kernel module that handles loading the binary driver. The Linux kernel modules that aren’t part of Linux itself (which most drivers are) must be compiled for specific kernel and its binary can work only for that specific kernel and nothing else. This means that even if then driver is the same but kernel changes, the nvidia module must still be recompiled. There are two ways distros handle that: 1) by running the compilation process in the background while installing or updating the driver package 2) by shipping binary form of the nvidia module, in case where it’s distro that always recommends synchronization of all packages so that kernel and modules always match. Historically this caused way more problems than it sounds, compilation might have failed for certain kernels occasionally leaving users with broken video after simple system update. Overall though it mostly works fine, especially nowadays.

Another quirk is that the user-space part of the driver that exposes OpenGL and Vulkan interfaces for applications are also proprietary and closed source, and they must also match exactly with the kernel part of the driver. This creates another problem for sandboxed applications using for instance Flatpak. Applications in container won’t use the system-wide libraries, but rather ship their own - and that’s by design for good reasons. Flatpak will automatically detect NVIDIA and install matching driver just fine, but then after installing system upades, you must always update your flatpaks as well or the ones that use GPU in any way will simply fail to launch or fall back to software rendering making it extremely slow. This doesn’t happen for open source drivers, because Mesa can work with basically any kernel, so Mesa in Flatpak can be in completely different version than the one installed as system package. Moreover, I experienced problems with storage space because Flatpak wouldn’t automatically remove old NVIDIA drivers and after a year or so it was a chunky pile of NVIDIA drivers.

And even when it works, there can still be missing functionality or integration with the OS might not be perfect. Last time I used them I was limited to X11 with many quirks regarding multi monitor setup and vertical synchronization. Wayland is technically usable now on NVIDIA, but not perfected yet.

“Elon, deep down you will always be cringe no matter how much money or power you have.”

Deep down? To me he’s cringe on the very outside.

Nice

What you’re referring to as Linux is actually Uutils/Linux…

It literally hasn’t changed even a tiny bit since I first saw it in 2006 :)

I currently use Strawberry - a well maintained fork of the old Amarok player before they redone the UI for KDE 4. It does what I care the most:

• Tree view collection with artist -> album grouping
• Files view
• Lyrics
• Tag editor
• Queue
• Last, but definitely not least - gapless playback

Because it was. Only very late right before the project was killed they renamed it

Plot twist: he grabs you out of the bush and kiss

If you come with expectations that you’ll just be fully catered no matter what your setup is and expect things to just work without ever trying to understand problems, you sure can be disappointed. Believe or not, most of the time those issues are out of control for Linux or the distros, as your hardware vendor made it to work on Windows and Windows only. Community is here to help you, but with your attitude it gets difficult no matter how much others try to help.

Pretty much because for some reason it’s broken mess in native games with SDL, and works nicely when using Proton, I noticed that too.

Hi there, having two dualsense and one ps4 controller, using them for ages on Linux and they mostly run great, but your issues doesn’t sound completely new either.

It’s very important on how you installed Steam and whether it’s native package or Flatpak. For Flatpak you might need special udev rules to allow the controller inside sandbox, usually can be installed using steam-devices package.

As others said, enable Playstation Controller support in Steam’s controller settings page.

Check if Steam overlay is functioning. In-game, press Shift+Tab and you should see the overlay and then you should be able to get to controller settings. Try out both with Steam Input enabled and disabled - by default I guess it depends on the game, but mostly enabling it will make it work for games that have issues picking up ds natively.

Test your controllers using something like jstest-gtk. Perhaps there is something else connected that acts as player 1 controller.

Don’t forget that at this point X11 doesn’t have feature parity with Wayland more than the other way around. Mixed DPIs, refresh rates, multi-display VRR, virtual screen resolutions, nested compositing, direct scan-out, GPU hot plugging, DRM leasing, HDR are all exclusive or at least better on Wayland.

It actually was merged just few days ago, I mean the color management protocol

You have to decide whether you want to be Linux app or GNOME app

On 6 you can have similar experience to Latte with just the panel minus the animations and some of its customizations

Tweaks and preconfigured distros aren’t solution here. The driver is still lacking certain features and that can only be fixed by NVIDIA

Generally the industry shifted in a direction where it heavily relies on containers for running cloud applications. This solves many problems with traditional server systems where you’d be sticking to certain distro, so certain dependencies are in fixed versions, which brings some limitations. Container is an environment to run process in an isolated way so that it had its own root filesystem, its own view on what resources are available, sort of like it was separate machine, but it’s still running on the same machine natively using the same kernel as the host. You can then have multiple of such containers, all serving its narrow purpose and they all come with the complete fs and whatever distro release they are tested with. Nowadays cloud computing is all about containers and they come from images that are built in OCI format using Dockerfile syntax. After building an image, it is typically pushed into registry where it can be pulled from over network to be utilized across different nodes, which makes it pretty easy to scale and propagate changes in cloud environments.

Now what that means to Bazzite/Universal Blue is that it uses similar tech to deploy the system, though the target here is your local machine. Of course some of the characteristics aren’t relevant in this scenario, but it solves some of the same problem - build predictable and reproducible environment that can be thoroughly tested before publishing. The general idea is similar to how devops build cloud apps: there is CI pipeline that runs the build using giant Dockerfile (or Containerfile, same thing) inside of which they include everything that the system needs (running traditional package manager and act as it was normal Linux distro during the build), which then results as image that’s being pushed to registry. Bazzite users then install updates by pulling new version of the image and ‘rebasing’ to it. It is called rebasing here, because rpm-ostree lets users add additional layers with more packages on top of that.

EDIT: here’s the Containerfile I’ve been talking about: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile Might give you some idea on how this works.

How is Debian beginner friendly? Quite far from it imho

Like together? Probably not

You might like Arch, especially now that it has installer, I wouldn’t consider it hard to setup and use. Also you’re not even new to Linux so youll handle it easily

I saw that right after donating, right after restarting my laptop after long time and seing the notification. I saw the chart and was like “dang, there was more poeple like me, also xmass time or smh” xD