Rant about Nvidia related updates on Linux

And in addition to that, it's the only thing that breaks on my system that isn't my fault.

My next GPU will definitely be AMD unless Intel catches up very quickly.

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.

ZFS users: "First time?"

Permanently Deleted

Uses NVIDIA

Imaaaagine!

Seriously though, I feel for you. NVIDIA is shit and while you're dealing with this, I hope you know which vendor you'll not be giving money to in the future. Fuck NVIDIA.

The flatpak thing is a known issue, where it doesn't correctly remove the 32bit package on update.

This bash script should find the latest and remove the rest:

#!/bin/bash
# Filename: flatpak-clean-nvidia.sh

# List latest 64bit Nvidia flatpak (it doesn't leave cruft behind) and note the version
FLATPAK_LATEST_NVIDIA=$(flatpak list | grep "GL.nvidia" | cut -f2 | cut -d '.' -f5)

# List all installed 32bit Nvidia flatpaks, ignore latest version, uninstall rest of list
flatpak list | grep org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia- | cut -f2 | grep -v "$FLATPAK_LATEST_NVIDIA" | xargs -o flatpak uninstall

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.

What other problems do you encounter? Updates are a bit annoying, but I haven't had any actual issues so far.

My exact solution to this on Endeavour was to just stop using flatpaks lol.

Literally everything I used from flathub was also either on the AUR or trivial to install manually from the host GitHub.

I was wondering what the fuss was about until I read flatpak. I don't use those, no reason to on Arch since everything is in the AUR. But it was interesting to read.

You have a bunch of duplicated stuff because flatpak is a piece of shit. With traditional packaging apps supporting your platform would get exactly one choice. Support the fucking version of nvidia that everyone else gets to or fuck off. In all likelihood all your shit would work work with the most recent release but because they have the option to be lazy fucks and make you download Nvidia 7 times this is your life now. Also if dkms takes appreciable time you either need to stop running Linux on a toaster or delete some of the 17 kernels you are hoarding for some reason. You need like 2 the one that you know works and the new one you just installed.

I've kind of gotten used to the first issue already. I don't know if I can switch to the non-DKMS drivers now that I'm using the LTS kernel though.

If you use the Zen kernel there is no reason to keep the regular one around.

Which terminal font is that, by the way?

If you have several kernels you might want to disable the fallback kernels. You do so in the .preset files in /etc/mkinitcpio.d/

But yeah this is the downside of using flatpaks. That's why I think it's better to avoid flatpaks and other similar sandbox environments. I know the Linux community are desperate for the increased stability and supposed benefits to security but you're paying the price in worse performance and high disk usage.

I switched from a 3070 to an Rx 7900XT on Sunday. Uninstalling all of nvidia shit was great. I used linux-zen so that meant using nvidia-dkms. So happy I don't have to deal with that anymore. And yeah, I use a lot of flatpaks, so removing all of those nvidia drivers was also a great feeling. And now I can use Wayland!

For what concerns flatpak, did you try flatpak remove --unused?

Edit: I didn't read you already did it, nvm

Eyyy, i just updated all that too!

flatpak uninstall —unused

Im not a PhD on Arch, but, why are you using Flatpak to install a driver that is available at AUR??? When it comes to drivers, try to stick to your distro ones, unless you really know what you are doing!

You can manually remove all of the previous drivers and their GL32 counterparts, your flatpaks will still run as long as you have the newest drivers.

I'm not sure why they don't get caught by the --unused flag, but they are definitely not needed from the flatpaks I've tested with.

Thank you for not blaming maintainers who have no controlover nvidia idiocy.

Also why not mesa?

That's what you get when you build unstable kernel APIs. Meanwhile in sane land: https://docs.kernel.org/gpu/drm-uapi.html

I don't get these kind of problems with windows