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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 autoinstallMight 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.