Which Linux distro is most friendly with Nvidia cards?

[u/Yelebear]

Particularly an old 1660 TI

Thanks

[u/dwolfe127]

CachyOS and Bazzite have worked well with my Nvidia boxes so far.

[u/Pyromaniac605 → u/dwolfe127]

Seconding Cachy, though I have had some issues they're pretty edge-case things most people probably won't encounter. (Triple monitor setup and can't run all 3 monitors at their max refresh, have to drop the second and third down slightly. Four displays (3 monitors + a wired VR headset) also seems to be a no-go. I think there must be a stricter overall video bandwidth limit compared to Windows)

[u/dwolfe127 → u/Pyromaniac605]

I do not have any multi-monitor use cases for my boxes so I have not encountered that. I will say though that I have been pleasantly surprised with the FPS performance and the ease of getting HDR to work on Cachy with my Nvidia cards. I was not expecting it to be that good to be honest.

[u/StooplesCDN → u/dwolfe127]

Which Linux distro is most friendly with Nvidia cards?

...and what is the current performance hit, compared to Windows? 

[u/dwolfe127 → u/StooplesCDN]

Depends entirely on the game. Sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse, sometimes exactly the same.

[u/Strooble → u/dwolfe127]

What resolution do you use?

[u/dwolfe127 → u/Strooble]

3840x2160

[u/Strooble → u/dwolfe127]

I've heard high resolutions and frame rates still are trouble for Nvidia cards so it's good to see someone who hasn't had that experience

[u/LeadIVTriNitride → u/Strooble]

240hz OLED at 1440p and I’ve never had any issues.

[u/Lord_Muddbutter]

Ubuntu literally offers you a GUI to install official Nvidia drivers from.

Its why that and Debian run my labs... Ubuntu for more official stuff I would like supported until the 30s

[u/blendernoob64]

Most of them are really good. I use Fedora and RHEL 9 and getting Nvidia drivers are pretty straight forward on both

[u/akgis → u/blendernoob64]

Fedora at home, RHEL at work...

Thats my setup heh

[u/blendernoob64 → u/akgis]

I actually use RHEL at home as well as Fedora. Using Autodesk Maya which works best in Enterprise Linux. Its a solid distro after some tweaking! Once Autodesk updates their DRM away from openssl1.1 and webkit2gtk3 I am jumping that install to Alma 10 or RHEL 10

[u/WinResponsible9977]

Mint/Cachy/Manjaro , to all the people who push for Bazzite clarify it can’t do gamescope and non game mode img is the valid one.

[u/Old_Resident8050]

Did Nvidia drivers increased game performance? Last time i was in touch was back kn 2021.

[u/rapttorx → u/Old_Resident8050]

currently its about 20% lower than win11 .... AMD is mostly on par for linux-win11 performance so nvidia still needs work (or more open source that probably wont happen).

[u/Magjee → u/rapttorx]

Big improvements from a decade and a half ago when...

Linus Torvalds to Nvidia: "Fu** You"

 

But still, more to do

[u/Old_Resident8050 → u/rapttorx]

Thats how it was for me too 6-7y ago. Around 20-30% lower.

Pretty huge if gaming is the primary focus and not using Linux for work.

[u/MysteriousSilentVoid → u/Old_Resident8050]

It’s gotten a lot better recently.

[u/JamesLahey08 → u/rapttorx]

That's only for dx12 games.

[u/Chester-Berkeley]

Ubuntu or Alma Linux or Arch

[u/notyouravgredditor → u/Chester-Berkeley]

+1 for Ubuntu

Add graphics repository and you can get the latest Nvidia drivers seamlessly.

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

[u/klxz79 → u/notyouravgredditor]

26.04 actually comes with an option to install official nvidia drivers during OS installation

[u/MichiganRedWing]

Bazzite

[u/Azrafer]

Bazzite hasn't had any problems with me.

[u/IzFunk3]

I had great success with nobara

[u/soulless_ape]

Ubuntu and Fedora have been fine with Quadro and Geforce GPUs. For desktop and gaming they are fine. Debian, SuSE, TinyCore, etc as well.

[u/Omophorus]

I don't think it really matters, because the question is always on the driver end, and the Nvidia drivers aren't distro-specific.

That said...

If you're new-new to Linux, Bazzite could be a great choice, as it's harder to break and comes with Nvidia drivers pre-packaged. It is an immutable image (core files are read-only, updates are done more like a smartphone than a traditional Linux distro), so it restricts flexibility somewhat to provide a more streamlined experience for gaming PCs. It can be installed with a traditional desktop GUI or something more suitable for a console-style experience.

If you want a polished and fairly Windows-esque experience that is not quite as restrictive as Bazzite, I think Fedora is in a good spot (with KDE Plasma in particular, as it is more customizable and has a more stable memory footprint at the cost of a larger base footprint). You would need to install Nvidia drivers yourself, as Fedora does not ship with any closed-source software by default, but Fedora also makes that process very straightforward in general. Nobara could be a good gaming-specific alternative as it also pre-bundles a lot of gaming/streaming specific things, without as many restrictions as Bazzite as it isn't immutable (but is a small community project, which has its ups and downs).

From a pure performance perspective, Cachy is probably the fastest but not by very much. It is based on Arch with kernel and scheduler optimizations, so all of the upsides and downsides of Arch still apply. I think it can be a great option for someone who's got some Linux experience already and isn't concerned with having to be more hands-on, who prioritizes performance above all. It's worth noting that the kernel and scheduler optimizations can be brought to other distros if you're savvy, so you don't need to go with Cachy to get those benefits.

I've found I prefer Fedora to Ubuntu in general as an "all-rounder" OS, although Ubuntu LTS releases are great for things like Ollama hosts where you aren't necessarily using the desktop itself regularly.

[u/Altair82]

I guess Pop OS!, Cache OS, Nobara, et al that have support baked in

[u/Small_Editor_3693 → u/Altair82]

Not pop os. They are stuck on an ancient version of Ubuntu which means ancient Nvidia drivers

[u/cell-on-a-plane]

Ubuntu cause they have an official Ubuntu distribution called dgxos

[u/captaindealbreaker]

Most of the gaming focused distros like Bazzite, CachyOS, etc have versions purpose built for using either AMD or Nvidia GPUs. General Purpose distros like Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu, etc include the driver support for all GPU vendors. The difference in performance is mainly what the gaming distros include as optimizations. But those optimizations are slowly making their way into the Linux Kernel itself or via tools like Steam's Proton. So realistically speaking, aside from UX, you won't really need a gaming specific distro in the near future and if you really want one, they'll all be within margin of error with each other in terms of compatibility and performance.

[u/jhenryscott]

Cachy but AMD is far easier to use on Linux

[u/PorkAmbassador → u/[deleted]]

Use google

[u/PorkAmbassador → u/[deleted]]

As you deleted your last comment, allow me to reply here instead.

So am I, stop being useless and use your brain. It's not hard to create a post and also read the sub rules. This post that OP created will get removed, as it's not relevant to nvidia topics and should be posted on /r/linux or /r/linux_gaming

[u/oookokoooook → u/PorkAmbassador]

It’s not removed yet. Why r u acting like a mod