this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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There are many reasons to dislike Nvidia on Linux. Here is a little thing that bugs me all the time, the updates. Normally the system updates would be quick and fast, but with the proprietary drivers of Nvidia involved, it gets quiet slow process. And I am not even talking about any other problem I encounter, just about the updates.

As an Archlinux based system user (EndeavourOS to be precise), I get new Kernel updates all the time. That means every time a new Kernel version is installed, the Nvidia driver DKMS has to be installed too. And that is basically the slowest part. But that's not too bad, even though it's doing this twice for each Kernel I have once.

What's more infuriating is, if you also happen to use Flatpaks for a very few applications. I really don't have many Flatpaks at all. Yet, the Nvidia drivers are installed in 7 versions or what?! And they are full downloads, each 340 MB or more. This takes ages and is the only part that takes long to update Flatpak system. I always do flatpak remove --unused to make sure nothing useless is present. /RANT (EDIT: Just typos corrected.)

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[–] urbeker 10 points 1 year ago

I suffered from this a few months ago as well. The space and bandwidth flatpak was taking for about 2 small cli applications was obscene. Like 30gb all because it had accumulated about 10 nvidia drivers. I found the issue on github and it was closed as intended behavior. I install alot of rust apps from source and updating them from source was faster and easier than updating flatpak just due to the overhead of maintain those drivers.

That and the fact that every app has to be run through an alias or a. overly verbose command made me discount flatpak as a serious project. You can't ignore UX to that extent and just rely on technical merits.