Rant about Nvidia related updates on Linux
Rant about Nvidia related updates on Linux
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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I have an alias I call "upd" that runs "yay ; flatpak update", I just run that, press Y at the first prompts and then let it run in the background while I do other work. It really doesn't matter at all how long it takes. I do have NVidia but generally I don't feel it takes very long as we don't get new kernels every day. You could use the linux-lts kernel for much more rare kernel updates.
It's a bit like bittorrents, I don't need them to download in 30sec, I start it and return to check on it whenever I think of it.
I have changed my opinion on flatpak btw, I really like that the apps are not spread all over my system but instead sandboxed neatly, have fewer dependency versioning issues and it's really easy to use.
@ProtonBadger The entire update process takes 20 minutes or so (never timed it), at least sometimes. I also had an alias before, but recently rewrote it as a script to do similar things, including pacman, yay, flatpak, rustup and a few other things. And from all of this stuff, most of the time its flatpak that inflates the update process time.
That's abnormal, it shouldn't be like that. My flatpak rarely has updates (compared to Arch/yay) and they're quite fast, still less than a minute even if there's updates to the NV libs (I didn't time it). There must be some kind of particular issue? What's your setup?
Looking at it - I got flatseal, chrome, firefox, thunderbird, dropbox, steam, joplin, cryptomator, mesa, NV libs, gimp, discord, resynthesizer, libreoffice and some other bits on flatpak. It's on an SSD, Internet 150Mbps. Is it installation or download that's slow for you? With it being 20min I would guess there's a problem with the download speed from the server, routing issue to flathub, etc? Flatpak is not that much of a slog.
@ProtonBadger No, I have full download speed for my connection, so it's not download speed. Everything downloads at full speed. The issue is, that so many driver versions are downloaded and updated. Mind you, this is not with every update so many. My point is, the entire update process could be done very fast if it wasn't Nvidia requiring so many downloads and installation process. Everything else is done quickly.