Linux

Trivial on Debian, see https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

Source : been gaming nearly daily on Debian with 2080ti for years now. Sometimes also tinkering with local AI via containers.

What distro are you using? It’s getting pretty simple at this point. I’m running Arch and it maybe took 5 minutes to fully set it up.

yay -S nvidia-open

Try Nobara if you plan on playing video games, it's a distro specialised for gaming and they have two sets of ISO : one "standard" and one "Nvidia" with the drivers preinstalled so you don't have to do anything.

https://nobaraproject.org/

I think the installer gives you a choice between the open-source drivers and the proprietary ones, and that's it. Everything works fine even on Wayland.

With CachyOS and Mint, it is very easy.

Remark: I disabled secure boot.

Depends on the distro. For most of the popular ones, it's as difficult as clicking a shortcut.

In my experience, dealing with repeated nvidia problems is not worth the hassle. Just replace it with a good AMD graphics card and sell that nvidia thing.

It's usually just one command to run.

its not terrible, it just sucks that its not automatic. i am not on windows and dont want to be treated like i am.

I mean I use zorin which is an ubuntu spin just made to be as usable as possible out of the box so its super easy. Barely an inconvenience. I see someone mentions bricking but I have not encountered it but I tend to use old hardware soooooo.... oh and i should say old nough that a 4060ti would seem pretty new.

Sometimes it's plug-n-play and everything works great. Sometimes you press the update Nvidia drivers button on your Ubuntu work computer and then need to tell IT you bricked your OS. YMMV

Barring any quirks; for Arch, RHEL, Rocky, Alma, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandrivia, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Void it's as simple as installing nvidia-open. Most other distros its the same, but the package name varies from repository to repository.

On your next pc go with an amd gpu. Just saying.

Currently linux mint offers an easy way to install Nvidia drivers. Avoid compiling the drivers from source.

It ranges from "automatic" to "infuriating".

If you have Secure Boot enabled, there are some hoops to jump through. Read the docs and follow the steps for DKMS.

Depending on your distro and your requirements, you might want to install the drivers manually from Nvidia rather than using older drivers from your distro.

If you need CUDA, god help you. Choose a distro that makes this easy and use containers to avoid dependency hell. Note that this is not any easier on Windows (at least not last I checked, which was a few years ago).