I have a friend who I recently learned is looking to switch to Linux and I offered to help, since I’ve been using Linux for ages. I’m not the most technical user, but in some ways I think that makes me uniquely well suited to be a new person’s guide, and I’m pretty familiar with the install and setup process sans one big thing, proprietary graphics drivers, I’ve generally always been installing Linux on a laptop it an integrated gpu

They let me know they have an nvidia graphics card, I think 30 series if I remember right, we don’t know what DE or distro might be a good fit for them and I told them we’d start by test driving a few, see what they thought of the interfaces, and pick a distro from there

Can you boot and use the OS without installing the proprietary drivers, or do you need to install them via like tty or something? I know nvidia started open sourcing their drivers and some amount is in the kernel now, I assume proprietary drivers are still optimal, if not explicitly necessary?

Any and all advice is welcome, it’s kinda hard to research something this general and get a sense for what the big picture looks like

Thank you!

  • Clay_pidginEnglish
    2•1 day ago

    Debian worked fine for me, but I had to switch to X from Wayland because it had problems with getting sick in hibernation. I did install the Nvidia recommended drivers. I play games, screen share, and video meet without issue.

    • CrisOPEnglish
      2•1 day ago

      Are you able to use a distro functionally until you get proprietary drivers installed? Having never been through the process I have no clue what it looks like or how any of it works 😅

      • Clay_pidginEnglish
        2•1 day ago

        Oh yeah, it worked out of the box, and maybe I didn’t need to install the nvidia drivers at all except that I play some games and had a few issues with games crashing while starting. I can’t say 100% it was the cause, but updating to the proprietary drivers fixed my issue.

        • CrisOPEnglish
          2•15 hours ago

          Gotcha, thank you. It kinda sounds like I can just help them figure out desktop and distro while using the open source drivers, and then regardless of what path they wanna go I can follow a tutorial for the process for whatever distro

          • Clay_pidginEnglish
            2•14 hours ago

            That’s exactly what I would recommend. See if it works out of the box and not fiddle with it unless there’s a problem.

            • CrisOPEnglish
              2•13 hours ago

              Gotcha, thanks! I wasn’t sure if that was possible

              I appreciate everyone’s guidance! hopefully it means I can get everything up and running smoothly for them :)