I’m planning on getting a laptop within the next month which will be my daily driver for university, and it has a RTX 5060. I know people have lots of issues with NVIDIA on Linux, but I don’t know of any specific issues. What issues can I expect running Fedora 42 (KDE) on this device?
I am not responding to most comments here, but I am silently taking them into account.
I have been using Endevour os with Wayland KDE for quite a while now with few issues. I bet you would be fine.
For gaming on Linux, use latest release (e.g. v575) of Nvidia driver. And for everything else stick to production release (e.g. v570).
You can expect your computer to function properly.
The Nvidia issue is overblown IMO. Yes, it used to be petty bad a couple of years ago with bugs and glitches all over the place, especially with Wayland. These days not so much. Just use the proprietary Nvidia drivers and you will have a solid experience. It’s honestly been over a year since I last had an issue that I could narrow down to Nvidia hardware.
Just make sure to read some reports from people with the same model of laptop. Laptops with very specific hardware can have compatibility issues.
I don’t know about that man. Installed Fedora 42 and GNOME to run with my RTX3080 and GNOME froze and crashed at random constantly. Installed KDE Plasma instead and it runs just fine.
I get what you’re saying but I don’t think it’s overblown having put up with issues myself with a mainstream 3070 card. A year really isn’t very long and it’s been a series of issues for me. When I’ve seen reports that the issues are fixed I have tried Wayland sessions and still find basic problems like video lag on my dual 4k set up without any clear solution. I have an Nvidia GPU and I avoid Wayland as a result.
My feeling is that they’ve fixed the issues perhaps for most useage cases but not all, and it can be enough for just 1 unfixed issue to ruin your experience.
I have a 3070 and am Linux only now; I’m currently looking at an upgrade for my GPU and genuinely I’m not even looking at an Nvidia GPU such have the annoyances been with Nvidia and wayland support. Many people who want specific features of Nvidia cards may not be so lucky
Even if Wayland support is fixed, I’m in the category of once bite twice shy with Nvidia on linux.
It should work. The only practical issues are:
- Usually, you will have to manually install the proprietary drivers (I think Fedora makes this relatively easy)
- Wayland (the protocol most desktop environmentss use nowadays) support may be hit-and-miss at times (it will mostly work but it’s not as polished as with Intel/AMD), and Proton (the thing that lets you play Windows games) may not play well either.
The ideological issue (which you probably don’t care about) is that it pretty much requires proprietary (non-FOSS) drivers which run in kernel space and so in theory have complete access to all data on your computer (but then so does Intel ME). This is the main reason I personally will never use NVidia cards.
Yes, on fedora you just click the check box for the Nvidia driver repo in KDE Discover or Gnome Software, and you’re good.
