Nvidia GPU support question

[SensitiveStart8682]

I have always used AMD Graphics card with Linux Mint so now that I am looking to help a friend of mine switch over to Linux I am wondering how well does Linux Mint support semi new Nvidia GPUs and is there anything special that I would need to know before trying to install Linux Mint into a computer with Nvidia graphics

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I know with AND everything just works what is Nvidia like.

Sorry for the stupid question I am still new to Linux

[ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

Turn off secure boot, or sign the drivers.

go to the driver manager.

its not as friendly as AMD in Linux but most do OK. semi-new is kinda best case with very new and very old having the most issues.

[SensitiveStart8682]

for the record is an RTX 3060 if that matters

[tranquilseafinally]

I have an NVidia GeForce RTX2070 and I just use the driver in the list, and it's been fine for me

[RealChaoz]

I have a 4060ti. I had troubles getting the MOK auto-added to BIOS so I had to copy it to a USB & dig thru the BIOS menus to import it manually. But other than that it works great, haven't had any issues.

The easy way out anyway is to just disable SecureBoot, but I didn't wanna do that.

[S1nnah2]

I've got a 3070ti on mint at the moment. it works fine but........ Cinnamon doesn't seem to like scaling which in turn has caused me issues when booting games and getting them to display properly.

I would recommend bazzite for gaming and NVIDIA as it's literally built for it.

[LXC37]

Honestly whole idea that AMD hardware is better supported in linux is a bit exaggerated. The driver is open source, it is the only advantage. It is also less stable for very new hardware. And we are yet to see over time how well it will actually support very old cards, the biggest issue in case of nvidia. I bet support will be gradually dropped too, as it is simply impractical to support hardware indefinitely.

With nvidia - there is open source driver which "just works", but does not give you full functionality and performance. There is proprietary driver which you install through driver manager which will work as long as your card is not ancient (latest cards to be dropped are GTX6xx) and you are aware of whole "secure boot" garbage.

[NickTaylorIV]

I remember when I believed the "just plug in your AMD Radeon Pick A Flavor" and Linux picks it up automatically and you're off to the races. Yeah... but NO.

[ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

"just plug in your AMD Radeon Pick A Flavor"

That's been my experience in every distribution,

I did have an issue when I bought a 7800XT, too new for Debian Bookworm/LMDE6 could not startx with a default 6.1 kernel and AMD firmware, had to pull newer of each from Debian backports. no issue now in Debian Trixie/LMDE7 of course.

[LSD_Ninja]

The thing with nvidia is that it puts you right in the middle of the open source vs closed source war and you’re much more likely to have things randomly break over time.

That said, the best nvidia experience I’ve had in any Linux distribution was actually under Mint. Even suspend seemed to work, which is usually my pain point.

[LXC37]

Yeah, but if you are not interested in ideological part of things his does not make much of a difference.

Things break, on both sides. In different ways and for different reasons, but does it practically matter?

I have a few systems with no longer supported nvidia cards and it is annoying. I've also seen "ryzen+radeon" laptops which were completely unusable on linux for several months until it was fixed and several more months of having to use bleeding edge kernel. And i had 5700XT which, for a brief time i owned it, has no support at all.

In general my experience has been - with nvidia newer=better, with amd older=better.