I switched to Wayland and Gnome in 2021 and been Radeon exclusive since 2019. Since then, I have had zero reason to go mess around with drivers. Shit just works. No need for a driver manager. I get bi-monthly Mesa updates with the regular package updates and that is the way I like it.
The drawback to the model is, of course, that it takes a while for day 1 support of the hardware to trickle down to me. So I delay my purchases of hardware for up to a year or so. Any problems I will encounter with new hardware is temporary, but still annoying, so I wait and see a little. It sucks if you need the bleeding edge tech, but otherwise, this suits me just fine.
It is two different viewpoints of the same coin, but yeah, not having to worry about drivers at all beats having an awesome driver manager in my book. Feel free to disagree, your use case is different from mine after all.
Because the codecs are embedded on the cards themselves - or at least part of the Nvidia firmware. It is a neater packaging, to be sure, but what can you do when corps ask for ten cents per distributed copy of a codec? If Ubuntu had to pay a few bucks for each distribution downloaded they would be bankrupt already, not to mention nonprofits like Mint and Debian.
I agree it is a hassle for users but there is pretty much nothing Linux or Distro devs can do at this point, other than promote free(er) non-patented codecs. Nvidia does have the economic muscles to make this easier for their users though.
Also, I do it like most Normies and pretty much stream exclusively nowadays via Netflix / HBO et cetera, and those work flawlessly on Linux with or without Nvidia, so while codecs are still a hassleā¦ They are not as big of a deal in 2025.
TBF if you really need this then you are probably in the camp of people that could easily install an additional repo to get the latest kernel/mesa.
I know what you want to say, but what youāre saying is not really a thing at least for video. I know youāre likely referring to AV1 and/or VP8/9 (for older gen), but these are also patented (or large parts of the compression anyway).
What these codecs are is royalty free, i.e. users and manufacturers donāt need to pay anyone to use them. Itās a boring legal distinction but it is an important one, because even for AV1 there are (troll?) patent pools that want to collect royalties for supposed patents they are holding. The AOM on the other hand is making sure that patents that are definitely related to AV1 are signed over or agreed upon to not collect royalties.
Itās been a few years since I started using Fedora for my daily driver at home. Had a few struggles initially and also felt weāre like 3~5 years away from it being a ready to use out of the box for non-technically savvy.
Still feels the same way 3~5 years later
From my own experience, bluetooth/audio is still a little bit short of ājust worksā. Ironically, my Windows VM running on qemu/kvm has more reliable bluetooth/audio connectivity than my main Fedora desktop.
I canāt even get that ideally on Windows I have some weird TCL HDR TV that washes-out everything in HDR mode, and Windowsās auto SDR just makes everything non-HDR washed out or bright. HDR mkvs played on the TV itself from USB stick look fine. I think it was only weird on PC (AMD and NVIDIA) but Xbox One and PS4 were fine same cables.
Apparently thereās different HDR standards and something with luminance values; my TVās box just straight-up says HDR no hint of spec. I just stick with SDR everywhere currently before trying to decipher how that works
Yes and no.
Thereās HDR10 and HLG for static HDR, the latter being backward compatible with SDR. These are the most basic ones and AFAIK when a TV is ācertifiedā for HDR, it has to support HDR10, but not HLG (but I could be wrong and/or out of date on that).
Then thereās HDR10+ as Samsungās (and a couple othersā) take on Dynamic HDR, which is backward compatible to HDR10.
And then thereās Dolby Vision which can be both static and dynamic and is a general clusterfuck of a proprietary standard and can - but doesnāt have to be depending on the profile in use - be backward compatible to HDR10.
But either way that sounds like an issue with the EDID not being correct, you can probably force an HDR format in the driver somewhere. But I also havenāt been on Windows in a hot minute so I wouldnāt know where to look.
incidental , tomorrow is 5 months, check in. i havent booted into windows hardly at all this whole time. though i have been wanting to just to do a drive/ program cleanup. the thing that i continue to not get working right is my large drive storage pool in my server. i got something to work about halfway a few weeks ago, but still eneded in a fail. just havent had to time to ither try again, or try something else.
Fedora may update and reboot a lot and since my RX480 to my RX7800XT it updated flawlesslyā¦ I have to reinstalled a few times too hardware lose. Never fedoraās fault.
I am a little over 9 months into daily driving Linux on my personal system. I got tired of trying to solve the deal breakers keeping me from doing so on my main machine and bought a mini pc to use for day to day use and only fire up my main system rarely.
I have been running Fedora - KDE Plasma Spin and enjoying it as expected. I have used Ubuntu for over a year at a time previously, so I was not expecting problems. Using Plasma has been more pleasant for me than using Gnome, like I had previously.
Starting the challenge, well I guess less of challenge for me since Iāve been working with linux for a long time. I have stuck to Windows because, well, games. With how bad Windows 11 seems to be and how much better gaming on linux has become, I am switching to ubuntu with my new PC.
I have some weird TCL HDR TV that washes-out everything in HDR mode, and Windowsās auto SDR just makes everything non-HDR washed out or bright. HDR mkvs played on the TV itself from USB stick look fine. I think it was only weird on PC (AMD and NVIDIA) but Xbox One and PS4 were fine same cables.