this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Can't run Windows 11? Don't want to? There are surprisingly legal options

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[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Pre-installed Nvidia drivers will likely be fixed in the next two years, but:

  1. You'll have zero driver issues if you use an Nvidia compatible distro like PopOS or Nobara

B. The 25% of gamers not using Nvidia GPUs do not have driver issues on Linux

III. Windows has tons of driver issues, so I'm not sure why Linux Nvidia drivers are a significant detail here. We don't expect little Jimmy to know to install drivers, and know what to do when windows update fucks your drivers randomly. Linux actually soves those issues for you.

if you use an Nvidia compatible distro like PopOS or Nobara

I don't know what that even means. Pretty much any distro is "Nvidia compatible," you just need whatever the package is for your distro. Rolling release distros can have issues occasionally, so just use something like snapper and rollback if there are issues.

[–] mrvictory1@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The 25% of gamers not using Nvidia GPUs

*%10 unfortunately

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 1 points 1 day ago

steam hardware survey shows 17% AMD and 8% Intel

[–] djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

III. Little Jimmy doesn't really need to, because the amount of times that windows update completely bricks your drivers is pretty low. You're clearly overestimating the driver issues that people experience with Nvidia or otherwise on Windows. Neither myself nor any of the people I know have ever experienced any significant driver-based issues while playing on Windows, and the truth is that the vast majority of Windows users do not even need to know what a graphics driver is to be able to easily play games on Windows.

Yeah it's great that AMD support seems to be great and I agree that Nvidia sucks as a company, but I'm not the one claiming Linux is the greatest gaming system.

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Ok fair, last time I used windows you had to install gpu drivers manually. I think you still are recommended to do so, since the windows ones are really old.

But yeah manual driver installation/specialized distros for Nvidia is a problem that's in the process of getting fixed with NVK, Nova, and the official drivers. Intel and AMD are there already.

I would rather have one extra manual step like that than dealing with/paying for Windows 11

[–] djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago

If it was just one extra manual step, it'd be fine. In my experience working with Nvidia drivers on Mint and later Ubuntu, it's more like 15 extra steps and some things still don't work. Sure, it's better than dealing with Windows 11, but from my experience it has not felt like less hassle than getting games running on Windows 10. Maybe that's just an Nvidia issue, and I certainly would love to upgrade to an AMD system for better Vulkan support, but that's not happening anytime soon.