To be fair, Nvidia support on Linux has been historically quite poor, with users having to manually install drivers (something the average person shouldn’t have to think about). Though even that has gotten much better recently, with Debian now allowing forks to have proprietary drivers built in.
I would say Nvidia historically (10+ years) had great support for Linux.
They were officially releasing drivers with feature parity to Windows. To get real manufacturer supported drivers, for a GPU none the less, was a breath of fresh air. This was in the era of having to be careful what wifi card you choose.
Sure, you had to manually install the drivers, which was not the norm with Linux, but that was still the case with Windows too. It wasn’t until Windows 7 that “search for a driver” feature in Windows actually did something.
It’s really only been recently, with AMD releasing official GPU drivers for the kernel, that things have changed. If you were putting a GPU in a Linux computer 10 years ago it absolutely would have been Nvidia.
By the way, Ubuntu and probably most Ubuntu-based distros (like Linux Mint) also have driver manager (ubuntu-drivers) that handles drivers similarly to the “search for driver” feature. Except that ubuntu-drivers also let’s you select between multiple drivers and let’s you easily uninstall them.
I just checked Lenovo from Google Search. I only checked the British site, but if you select “No OS” instead of Windows 11 Home, it’s -90£ (115USD)!
Holy hell! I didn’t realize Windows license makes up such a big part of the price.
Now I wonder how much of the price it could be with the cheap Umax laptops sold in Czech republic and Slovakia. They start at €130 with Windows Pro license.
To be fair, Nvidia support on Linux has been historically quite poor, with users having to manually install drivers (something the average person shouldn’t have to think about). Though even that has gotten much better recently, with Debian now allowing forks to have proprietary drivers built in.
I would say Nvidia historically (10+ years) had great support for Linux.
They were officially releasing drivers with feature parity to Windows. To get real manufacturer supported drivers, for a GPU none the less, was a breath of fresh air. This was in the era of having to be careful what wifi card you choose.
Sure, you had to manually install the drivers, which was not the norm with Linux, but that was still the case with Windows too. It wasn’t until Windows 7 that “search for a driver” feature in Windows actually did something.
It’s really only been recently, with AMD releasing official GPU drivers for the kernel, that things have changed. If you were putting a GPU in a Linux computer 10 years ago it absolutely would have been Nvidia.
By the way, Ubuntu and probably most Ubuntu-based distros (like Linux Mint) also have driver manager (
ubuntu-drivers) that handles drivers similarly to the “search for driver” feature. Except thatubuntu-driversalso let’s you select between multiple drivers and let’s you easily uninstall them.There’s also pop!_OS which can come preinstalled with Nvidia drivers
Pop is a fork of Ubuntu, which is a fork of Debian.
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I misread your comment, I’m super tired. But afaik pop has been the only distro to have an ISO with Nvidia drivers built in for years now, I think
And? Whats that to do with the parent comment?
Don’t you have to do that anyway if you install Windows yourself?
If you’re getting a prebuilt (which most people do) then drivers will be preinstalled.
Well, same if you had Linux pre-installed.
Unfortnetly, very little hardware comes with Linux preinstalled.
Let me present you with a few:
I just checked Lenovo from Google Search. I only checked the British site, but if you select “No OS” instead of Windows 11 Home, it’s -90£ (115USD)!
Holy hell! I didn’t realize Windows license makes up such a big part of the price.
Now I wonder how much of the price it could be with the cheap Umax laptops sold in Czech republic and Slovakia. They start at €130 with Windows Pro license.
I believe Windows license cost change based on GDP of the country where it’s sold. So might not be the same savings, unfortunately.
Lenovo also have Red Hat Certified on alot of their computers, which mean every component will work with RHEL.