this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Hopefully this is the right place to ask. Lemme know otherwise.

I got a Thinkpad W530 with Quadro K2000M GPU (Kepler). With coreboot, I was able to get around all the headaches related to Optimus only having the discrete GPU enabled.

The GPU itself is well-supported by nouveau driver, missing only a few features on the power management side of things.

Things are good when I run stuff natively. However, I have yet to figure out Flatpak. I know we use org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.* packages that are some kind of Mesa abstraction layer.

Things are much more straightforward with Intel and AMD GPU. It is actually quite easy with the proprietary NVidia driver, but it doesn't exactly come free.

The ultimate question is: Should I install one of those org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-<ver> packages with my nouveau? If so, which version?

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[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Those Flatpak drivers for your Nvidia card will be installed if an application depends on it. I think you don't need to install them yourself. And over time you might end up having multiple versions of the Nvidia driver installed as Flatpak, just because each of the applications depend on a specific driver version. This was my experience until last year on my main PC, with the proprietary driver using a GTX 1070.

To uninstall all unused Flatpak packages, use the command: flatpak uninstall --unused (but I think this does not work for the Nvidia drivers for unknown reasons to me)

[–] timkenhan@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How would Flatpak know which driver to install?

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 points 5 months ago

I think its a dependency of the application you install, that makes use of the driver. The programs don't use your native graphics driver, but a version from Flatpak. I suppose the packager can specify dependencies, just like KDE software would install the entire KDE suite as dependency.