Nope, will probably avoid 11 as long as I can though. I have an Mvidia card (drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux). And I need professional design software for work (as in, industry standard: Adobe or Affinity).
But I put 11 on my laptop to try it and I hate it. So many terrible UI changes, UX noticeably worse. Like they changed stuff just to say they changed stuff.
I considered going Linux for personal use and development, and then using another machine or dual boot for Mac for design software. But i learned about the Nvidia issues after I upgraded my card :/ and swapping to Mac’s walled garden after avoiding it for decades is… a sign of how bad W11 feels to use.
Bazzite makes nvidia pretty easy, although it can still be troublesome, they are working on it. There’s a different iso to install that is designed for nvidia, couldn’t be more straightforward.
Might be worth testing Linux with a separate drive. I know people still have trouble with Nvidia, but there are a lot of people (myself included) that just had to install the drivers and have had zero issues thereafter. Mine is a slightly older gaming laptop.
I have a desktop with an AMD card that I tried to put Linux on and couldn’t get the drivers to work. I’m going to try again in the summer and hope they’ve caught up.
If you have a newer NVIDIA, you should be good. It’s a little rough around the edges here and there (steam overlay flickered for a friend, but that was months ago and could well be fixed) , but to my understanding, the worst issues have been solved. And having previously used an RTX 2040, it worke perfectly where it truly matters.
Like others have said, try a dualboot. It can’t hurt.
Nope, will probably avoid 11 as long as I can though. I have an Mvidia card (drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux). And I need professional design software for work (as in, industry standard: Adobe or Affinity).
But I put 11 on my laptop to try it and I hate it. So many terrible UI changes, UX noticeably worse. Like they changed stuff just to say they changed stuff.
I considered going Linux for personal use and development, and then using another machine or dual boot for Mac for design software. But i learned about the Nvidia issues after I upgraded my card :/ and swapping to Mac’s walled garden after avoiding it for decades is… a sign of how bad W11 feels to use.
I dunno man, Debian makes it pretty easy.
x64 Kernel headers:
sudo apt install linux-headers-amd64Disable secure boot & add ‘Contrib’ repository to sources list:
sudo deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmwareInstall Nvidia driver
sudo apt install nvidia-driver firmware-misc-nonfreeRestart system.
Bonus points for optimal performance follow CUDA doc & OptiX doc for Ray-Tracing & utilization of Nvidia cuda cores.
On Ubuntu you can also just run:
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstallBazzite makes nvidia pretty easy, although it can still be troublesome, they are working on it. There’s a different iso to install that is designed for nvidia, couldn’t be more straightforward.
Might be worth testing Linux with a separate drive. I know people still have trouble with Nvidia, but there are a lot of people (myself included) that just had to install the drivers and have had zero issues thereafter. Mine is a slightly older gaming laptop.
I have a desktop with an AMD card that I tried to put Linux on and couldn’t get the drivers to work. I’m going to try again in the summer and hope they’ve caught up.
If you have a newer NVIDIA, you should be good. It’s a little rough around the edges here and there (steam overlay flickered for a friend, but that was months ago and could well be fixed) , but to my understanding, the worst issues have been solved. And having previously used an RTX 2040, it worke perfectly where it truly matters.
Like others have said, try a dualboot. It can’t hurt.
They haven’t been for a while now. On some newer distros they’ll install the Nvidia drivers at the same time as the OS itself.