this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Well, my brother installed linux (mint) on more than 30 laptops that we were fixing to reuse. Im pretty sure none of them had any driver problems.
Tbh, unless you have a NVIDIA graphics card, or are using arch*, driver issues almost never happen.
*my personal thinkpads wifi board didn't work in arch, but that may be because I had already borked that install completly.
Even the Nvidia graphics card sentiment is becoming outdated. There have been sizeable improvements in their drivers over the past couple years.
In my group of friends (all Linux gaming), I'm the only one with an NVIDIA card. I don't have more problems than the other folks, I just have different ones.
The biggest gripe I have, HDR and color management, are getting fixed in Wayland soon. In the meantime I use gamescope to get HDR and apply color correction filters with reshade.
Correct. I've been rocking their open source driver on Wayland for about a year now, pretty smooth experience.
Though sleep is still a neverending struggle.
You've been rocking it for what? Does it support the DLSS feature set now along with HDR and VRR? I mean, it sure did show me a desktop for the few days I spent trying to get a clean, working install of the proprietary driver, but I wasn't under the impression that I'd have feature parity without doing that.
VRR works as long as you're on a recent Wayland version.
HDR isn't a driver issue.
With X11, it ain't happening.
Wayland current supports HDR, however there isn't a protocol for applications to communicate with Wayland to configure themselves correctly. Some applications, like MPV, you can use an environmental variable to get HDR output (but not dynamic HDR, like HDR+ or Dolby Vision) and you can configure the parameters in the config.
Gamescope, the compositor that Valve uses for the Steamdeck, supports HDR for gaming. It works well for some games and completely fails for others.
Luckily, there's a Wayland color management/HDR protocol that is staging for an upcoming Wayland update so you won't need to depend on Gamescope to use HDR.
DLSS works in the games I've seen.
All of that in fully open source drivers? You sure about that? Is it per card?
Ultimately this is pretty much my point, you wrote a whole paragraph about this and I'm still not sure how accurate it is, which cards have which features supported or whether we're even talking about the same thing.
Considering the competition's implementation is "install this one piece of software day one, never think about it again", that is some ways away from a "pretty smooth experience", even without accounting for the parts that are buggy.
For the record, I'm aware of the state of affairs for Nvidia support overall (unfortunately, wish I didn't have to be). I'm gonna say you're wrong about HDR being a driver issue, though, seeing how it was outright disabled for what, three months? due to a showstopping driver bug. It seems to be back to working now, though.
In any case none of this is normie-friendly and an absolute dealbreaker for anybody on modern Nvidia hardware.
Someone coming from Windows would just use the proprietary drivers. It isn't like they're not used to using proprietary software.
The open source drivers (Arch: 'nvidia-open', not 'nvidia') have different problems but installing a completely open source system is an advanced task. If a user just wants to install a driver with the least effort then they'd just install the nvidia package and not the open source drivers.
It isn't a dealbreaker it's just a thing to know. Anybody who's at the point of trying Linux will have had to wade through a sea of people informing them of Nvidia issues, anti-cheat issues, etc.
The trade-off is that you can use an operating system that isn't shoving ads in your face, spying on you and forcing you to get a new PC with a TPM.
For some people that is the dealbreaker. They often find that giving up HDR for a few months, not playing Apex Legends and typing into a terminal is a small price to pay for being able to trust your operating system to be working for you and not for shareholders.
What do you mean, often? What's "often"? Linux's install base is what? 2-5% on desktop PCs, tops? And much of that has been fairly stable for a long time.
So who are these aggravated masses that are evening out the 90% of dedicated GPU users and the mass of people who just don't seem to have much of a problem and definitely not a motivation to move to Linux specifically?
There's a bit of size blindness in the community, where any movement is seen to be momentous and every inconvenience a turn of the tide and it comes off a bit delusional.
Also, "a thing to know" is one thing too many for people who bought a prebuilt PC and never touched anything about it until they bought the next one. And if they do buy a new GPU or whatever they expect to just jam it in there, turn the thing on and expect everything to work right away. Having to wade through all those warnings about Nvidia and anticheat is itself an aggressive way of disincentivizing moving for many people. Honestly, I have a running Linux install and if I have to hear one more time that Mint is the best distro for Windows users and works just fine out of the box I may scream and take a sledgehammer to my boot drive.
The proprietary driver? I went distro hopping, ended up trying four or five different ones. Some had the proprietary driver baked in, there were a couple of different processes for the installation for the others. The GPU wasn't the only hardware compatibility issue I was juggling, so by the time I also had audio going and the right DE setup to support my display features I ended up manually installing them in Manjaro by just finding a guide and blindly following whatever they told me to do.
Yeah, I was having trouble with sleep, and kwin compositing (KDE), so I switched to proprietary drivers and X11, its working pretty well.
I've defaulted to enabling the X reset on mine, just because waking from sleep is such shite.
In the last twenty years, I've pretty much only had nVidia hardware for graphics with very few issues.
Of course that wasn't in laptops. Having a GPU in a laptop is asking for trouble anyway in my opinion.
"Unless you have a computer in the 90% of users" is a hell of a dismissal.
In fairness, thin-and-light media and web use laptops are a different story, but for desktop use? That's a big stretch.
My man, you think 90% of pcs have a graphics card at all? I live in a poor country, so does the majority of the worlds population, and almost no one has a graphics card here.
No, I think 90% of the ones that do have a dedicated GPU have a Nvidia one. That's not an opinion, it's data that's widely available.
It's also, incidentally, just an example of one of the more egregious issues with the current state of Linux. It doesn't mean it's the only one.
In any case, that's not typically the space being discussed here. The advice generally is "get an AMD GPU", not "we are assuming you're on integrated graphics".
All AMD hardware, Bazzite was killing my GPU as soon as there was load on it and WiFi that worked intermittently, Mint had non working WiFi on a USB antenna that is supposed to be 100% Linux compatible.
So yeah, I would love it if Linux fanatics stopped pretending that Linux is just as plug n play as Windows, it isn't and solutions rely on trusting random people on the Internet.
I don't pretend anything, I commented my personal experiences. So I guess we both shouldn't expect our experience to be the norm...
And tbh, statistically you have the upper hand, most people do use windows after all. (76% or something like that?)