They are not distribution related. I’m on Arch Linux, which has been by far the best experience with Nvidia drivers out of the distributions that I’ve tried. In the past, the only problems were occasionally the kernel being too new and the drivers not supporting it properly, in which case I would just fall back to the LTS kernel. However, the quality of the drivers has gone down dramatically. There is no kernel level support for HDR like Intel and AMD have, which will be useful when desktops add support as well. This also means that HDR content can’t properly be played by Kodi, which can run without X11 or Wayland and support HDR like that.
On top of that, their BS EGLStreams-based Wayland support is broken. I’d been using Wayland on my systems for years, and the latest drivers caused so many issues that I had to revert back to X11. Firefox crashes very frequently with the new drivers on Wayland, and Google Meet in Chromium (which I use because it doesn’t support background blurring in Firefox) has an issue where the camera sometimes freezes and I have to click the button in the UI to turn if off and back on again. These are Nvidia wayland specific problems. They’ll supposedly be fixed in the next driver release (545) according to Mozilla, but the fact that they broke it in a production driver and are fine with leaving it like that for another couple months until the next release is ridiculous.
I also have an nvidia based machine connected to my TV that I had to switch to X11 before the buggy driver was released because it wouldn’t support 4K at 60Hz in Wayland, only X11. Under wayland it only supported 4K at 30Hz. No other machine I had had this issue, only the nvidia based PC.
I won’t be using any Nvidia based devices again unless an open source driver similar to AMDGPU is made and they fix the wild pricing that their current GPUs have.
They are not distribution related. I’m on Arch Linux, which has been by far the best experience with Nvidia drivers out of the distributions that I’ve tried. In the past, the only problems were occasionally the kernel being too new and the drivers not supporting it properly, in which case I would just fall back to the LTS kernel. However, the quality of the drivers has gone down dramatically. There is no kernel level support for HDR like Intel and AMD have, which will be useful when desktops add support as well. This also means that HDR content can’t properly be played by Kodi, which can run without X11 or Wayland and support HDR like that.
On top of that, their BS EGLStreams-based Wayland support is broken. I’d been using Wayland on my systems for years, and the latest drivers caused so many issues that I had to revert back to X11. Firefox crashes very frequently with the new drivers on Wayland, and Google Meet in Chromium (which I use because it doesn’t support background blurring in Firefox) has an issue where the camera sometimes freezes and I have to click the button in the UI to turn if off and back on again. These are Nvidia wayland specific problems. They’ll supposedly be fixed in the next driver release (545) according to Mozilla, but the fact that they broke it in a production driver and are fine with leaving it like that for another couple months until the next release is ridiculous.
I also have an nvidia based machine connected to my TV that I had to switch to X11 before the buggy driver was released because it wouldn’t support 4K at 60Hz in Wayland, only X11. Under wayland it only supported 4K at 30Hz. No other machine I had had this issue, only the nvidia based PC.
I won’t be using any Nvidia based devices again unless an open source driver similar to AMDGPU is made and they fix the wild pricing that their current GPUs have.
It’s your install then.