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.)

  • ProtonBadger@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    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.