What does a driver manager do that isn’t solved with a normal (graphical) package manager? Automatically picking the correct one for your GPU?
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Yeah, thats useful for laymen / people that dont want to tinker a whole lot
A driver manager will not make the problems inherent to Nvidia's crappy proprietary drivers that need workarounds go away.
If you don't want to tinker a whole lot, buy a GPU from a vendor that hasn't been actively hostile to its users for decades and is well supported by Linux and the freedesktop such as AMD.
No AMD GPU user has a need for anything resembling a "driver manager".
I don't know how "bleeding edge" it is, but Nobara is a good gaming distro maintained by GloriousEggroll (the maker of the GE versions of Proton on Steam) that also has a GUI driver manager. It's based on Fedora, so you're not gonna have the absolute latest stuff 100% right now as you might with Arch, but it will likely be ahead of anything Debian or Ubuntu based. The one drawback in my short experience with it so far is that the package manager sucks for exploring stuff or locating packages if you don't know the package name, it's just an alphabetical list you search through by name.
But as has been said elsewhere in this thread, if you're having driver issues with new Nvidia stuff, you may just be SOL until the Nvidia driver support in general catches up, no matter the distro.
GUI doesn't matter. AMD will always be simpler right now. Nvidia still has all kinds of issues. I think what you want to know is which distro has the fewest issues with Nvidia drivers? Just a guess.
GUI absolutely does matter for helping adoption of linux, I'm not interested in hearing arguments to the contrary either. Everything should be as GUI'd as possible if we want linux to grow
Linux mint lol
Is great for gaming and everything else too lol, you install nvidia drivers with like two clicks.
Kinda not what you're asking about but pop OS does provide an nvidia version of the ISO, so you wouldn't need to configure anything in the first place if you chose the correct ISO. Same with nobara, and probably other gaming focused distros.
What do you mean by a driver manager? I'm not familiar with that term, it sounds like a gui for managing and updating drivers. Or maybe you want something to help you switch between integrated graphics on your cpu to your dedicated gpu?
In most cases, updating drivers doesn't require a GUI and can actually create more work. For instance, compare this Manjaro video of how to use its gui to install Nvidia drivers vs this line of code to install/update the Nvidia drivers on endeavorOS.
eos-update --nvidia
Ofcourse if you use an arch based distro you can also use the arch wiki to help you manage your drivers exactly the way you want. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA
If you want to control which apps use your GPU or integrated graphics, than you can just install prime and prepend a package name with the string prime-run when opening or in steam launch settings.
Manjaro,
benefits of Arch,
while being gamer ready,
easier to use and more stable.
It also has a GUI to manage your graphics drivers.
easier to use and more stable.
citation needed
Go see for yourself,
don't knock it till you tried it.
I used to like Manjaro but they way they handled the recent pacman changes were so terrible that I no longer recommend it. It still has a great GUI and I think other arch based distros could learn from.