Wayland Nvidia

Most of this article seems unnecessary in 2025 and is very specific to Arch.

For most distributions you can simply install the (proprietary) nvidia drivers and you're good to go.

There is generally no tweaking or command line changes necessary for Nvidia to work on Wayland, including multi-monitors with different resolutions and refresh rates.

My "gaming" laptop is completely effed on most distributions, and forces me to use Linux Mint to select an older driver (which also causes problems.)

that sounds like a firmware issue rather than a driver one, laptops are known to have horrible apic including on windows (ex: asus laptops). https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive

I assume you have 2 GPUs and one is integrated?

In Arch, the current NVIDIA driver automatically sets KMS and the kernel command line and hyperland changes are no longer needed. Basically it just works now.

I had Nvidia up until a year ago or so. Every single time I had to do any kind of maintenance it was because of their drivers.

Since I don't play any more games than Minecraft and don't really need a fancy gpu I have switched to intel. Now I have two things which I buy intel only. GPUs and WiFi. I have had one glitch with opengl under a VM, but I am not sure that is intel only since it also had issues with my Nvidia card.

Correct. Running Ubuntu 25.10 with a RTX 50 series GPU and it just works.

Almost true. Some versions of the drivers, yes. Other versions, no. I didn't notice this until a few months ago but every now and then I'd have things like external monitors not working or one of them not waking from sleep on its own. So after like a week of banging my head against the wall on what configuration file I must've changed to break something, I found massive amounts of posts saying "I updated the driver and the following is now broken" so as a desperate attempt I backdated. Fixed everything. Immediately told apt to never update that driver ever again. There are still issues sometimes (like if the computer has been up for a few weeks the driver fails to allocate memory on display plug in), but in general it's usable.

I recommend everyone not update those drivers unless they're not working, and don't be afraid to downgrade. Almost every version has people saying on their system something doesn't work.

Half a dozen of NVidia cards in more than a decade on on Win/Lin. No major problems so far.. I had to install / remove drivers manually but only because I needed exact versions for some other software. Intel on Win/Lin works fine too.

  > very specific to Arch

What? The main difference between distros is the package manager. I don't see anything here that's distro specific other than editing the pacman config to enable multilib, which to be fair is default on with many distros.

But Systemd? That's on most distros these days. I'm pretty sure it is on all of those in the top 10.

Also, the OP is using CachyOS. You can tell b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶a̶n̶o̶ from the neofetch logo. But, I'll mention that if you checkout distrowatch, Arch based distros are incredibly common. Over the past 12 months the most downloaded distros are CachyOS (Arch), Mint (Deb/Ubuntu), MX (Deb), Debian, Endeavour (Arch), Pop (Ubuntu), Manjaro (Arch), Ubuntu, Fedora, Zorin (Deb/Ubuntu).

That said, you don't have to do any of this for either Endeavour (which I use) nor Manjaro (my old distro of choice). Along with Pop, one of the main motivations for these distros is Nvidia support. Really I don't expect most people to even be facing those problems these days. On Endeavour I've only run into one Nvidia problem over the last 5 years and it was when a beta driver conflicted with the most recent kernel. Super easy fix once I realized the problem.

On a side note/friendly reminder:

anyone that's using linux these days with an Nvidia card I suggest making sure your /efi partition is >1GB (at least 2GB but give it some headroom. Disk is still cheap). If you're putting the drivers in the kernel (you should), like done here, those are going to take up a lot of space. (If you get a space error, run `sudo du -ch --max-depth=3 /efi | sort -hr` to see the problem. You can, usually, safely delete any of the `initrd-fallback` versions and rerun `sudo reinstall-kernels`. They'll be built again but this will usually give you the headroom you need)

  >  completely effed on most distributions

How does the distribution make this an issue? You can always freeze drivers and install old ones. I get that it might not work out of the box, especially with rolling-release distros like Arch, but you also don't want rolling-releases for an older machine.

Yes, the laptop screen works fine but my external monitor connected to my gpu seems to run at about 10 fps when it should be 120.

I know it's also me that's the issue. But I just want a Linux distro that works. I've had enough of people saying "Nvidia has been getting so much better recently!" and "It's completely usable now!" when the newest drivers break my whole experience. I would use arch, and have tried about 5 times, but it's too complicated to get the driver I need and I won't even bother at this point. I've just accepted the fact that I'm going to use Mint until I get a desktop. Maybe I'll try to get help on a forum somewhere but idk, I think I would need personal help.

  > But I just want a Linux distro that works.

This is perfectly valid. But I would add that Arch is not that distro. Even though projects like Endeavour and Manjaro are trying that I don't think it'll ever be the case. You have rolling-releases and even though they've done a great job you're never going to be the most stable because of this.

But I think Pop is the best distro for this. System76 is highly incentivized to do exactly this and specifically with nvidia drivers and laptops (laptops create extra complications...). I can't promise it'll be a cure-all but it is worth giving a shot. I would try their forums too.

I totally get the frustration. I've been there, unfortunately. I hope you can get someone to help.

CachyOS just works for me. Highly optimized Arch working flawless and without hassle.

I know my ways around Arch, and in the about two years using CachyOS I never needed to intervene, with the exception of things like changed configs/split packages. But those are announced in advance on their webpages, be it Arch itself, or CachyOS, and also appear in good old Pacman in the terminal, or whichever frontend you fancy. It's THE DREAM!

What's lacking is maybe pre-packaged llm/machine learning stuff. Maybe I'm stupid, but they don't even have current llama.cpp, WTF? But at least Ollama is there. LM-Studio also has to be compiled by yourself, either via the AUR, or otherwise. But these are my only complaints.

  > Maybe I'm stupid, but they don't even have current llama.cpp, WTF?

I don't understand. It's in the AUR...

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/llama.cpp

  > has to be compiled by yourself, either via the AUR

I don't think I'd call the AUR "compiled by yourself". It's still a package manager. You're not running the config and make commands yourself. I mean what do you want? A precompiled binary? That doesn't work very well for something like llama.cpp. You'd have to deliver a lot more with it and pin the versions of the dependencies, which will definitely result in lost performance.

Is running `yay -S llama.cpp` really that big of a deal? You're not intervening in any way different for any other package (that also aren't precompiled binaries)

> I mean what do you want? A precompiled binary?

Yes, exactly :-)

Haven't used yay or other aur helpers so far. Maybe that's why my systems run so stable?

Should maybe look into it.

Have used Yaourt on Arch in the far past, with...errm...varying success ;->

  > Haven't used yay or other aur helpers so far. 
  > Have used Yaourt on Arch in the far past,

Yaourt is an aur helper?

  > Maybe that's why my systems run so stable?

Sorry?

  >>> I know my ways around Arch

Forgive me, you said this earlier and I think I misunderstood. What does this mean exactly? How long have you been using Arch? Or rather, have you used Arch the actual distro or only Arch based distros?

I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?

I have used plain Arch in the past, for several years, no derivatives.

At that time there existed an AUR-helper called Yaourt, which I made heavy use of. But often in haste, sloppy. Which lead to many unnecessary clean-up actions, but no loss of system. Meanwhile I had to use other stuff, so no Arch for a while. When the need for using other stuff was gone I considered several options, like Gentoo, but naa, I don't wanna compile anymore!1!! (Yes, Yes, I know they serve binpkgs now, but would they have my preferred USE-flags?) Maybe Debian, which can be fucking fast when run in RAM like Antix, but I had that for a while, and while it's usable, Debian as such is bizarre.

Anything Redhat? No thanks. SuSe? Same. So I came across CachyOS, and continued to use that, from the first "test-installation" running to this day, because it works for me, like I wrote before. Like a dream come true.

Remembering my experiences with Yaourt I abstained from using the AUR. And that worked very well for me, so far. Also the Gentoo-like 'ricing' comes for free with their heavily optimized binary packages, without compromising stability.

> I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?

Yes.

Are we clear now?

Edit: I'm so overconfident I'm even considering disabling the pacman-hooks into BTRFS-snapshots, because I never needed them.

No rollback necessary, ever, so far. Same goes for pacman cache. After every -Syu follows an immediate -Scc.

Because the only way is forwaaaaard ;-)

I've used Yaourt too. Things are a lot better these days. Yay is the standard. But I think the biggest help of helpers is updating.

Yes, we're clear now, but are you surprised by my hesitation? Because having that experience would imply you've had a lot of experience compiling things the long way. Running makepkg -si isn't that complicated. It's as easy as it gets. There's no make, no configure, no cmake, no determining the dependencies yourself and installing those yourself too. I don't get the issue. Take too long? Not happen automatically?

  > I'm so overconfident I'm even considering disabling the pacman-hooks into BTRFS-snapshots, because I never needed them.

lol yeah I'm sure they're not needed. Not hard to recover usually and yeah I agree, things are stable these days. I can't remember the last time I needed to chroot (other than an nspawn). I only snapshot data I care about these days and it's usually backed up remotely too. I've learned my lesson the hard way too many times lol.

> I don't get the issue. Take too long? Not happen automatically?

Yes and Yes. Long before Arch I did LFS and Gentoo. And NetBSD like Gentoo.

I'm having had it! Gimme binaries in the flavors (Hello OpenBSD!) I want/like!1!! ;->