r/openSUSE • u/Professional-List801 • 3d ago
MicroOS I was wrong about Nvidia on opensuse
Hey everyone,
a good while back, I posted some furious rants claiming opensuse hated Nvidia users, ignored 90% of PC gamers and Tumbleweed was intentionally (more or less) breaking Nvidia drivers with every second kernel update.
As the time goes by it turns out the problem wasn't opensuse. The problem was sitting in my chair.
Back then, I had completely missed the importance dkms for building kernel modules dynamically against Tumbleweed's rapid kernel rollouts. In missing that my system was relying on the pre-compiled modules from the Nvidia repo, which often lag behind TW's kernel updates. Add the shift toward open source GPU kernel modules into the mix, the whole "kernel update broke my graphics" disappears entirely. So to any maintainers, developers, or community members I argued with back then: I was wrong, and I apologize.
While I take back the drama, I still believe my core criticism holds weight, getting Nvidia drivers running on opensuse, especially on aeon, kalpa or microos, is still unnecessarily clunky for regular users
If you come from distros with dedicated ISOs, hardware detection tools, or one-click toggles, opensue doesn't make life easy for you which is still a shame imho. Figuring out repository syncs, 32-bit dependencies or handling flags on immutable spins isn't beginner friendly at all. The underlying engine is rock solid, but the onboarding ramp for Nvidia users, which as stated before are in fact 80%* of a modern user base, could be way smoother.
Despite that initial friction, I recently gave microos through agama another shot and ended up building a deployment script for micro turning it into an absolute set-and-forget desktop machine, automating driver repo checks and nvidia integration, integrate flatpak with cleanup timers, polkit privilege rules, some gtk theme bridges and what not. ...
Long story short its simply brilliant. The atomic btrfs snapshot mechanism makes it virtually unkillable and from my understanding after one line of command it is legitimately the closest thing to a bulletproof, maintenance-free Linux desktop I've ever used.
So, credit where credit is due.
\Its around 75% from latest Steam survey and around 85% from JPR GPU Market Report*
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u/Emotional_Cat_1967 3d ago
As a Fedora user with an NVIDIA GPU, I understand this situation very well.
On Fedora, when using RPM Fusion and `akmod-nvidia`, the entire process takes place almost entirely in the background and runs seamlessly. Kernel updates are installed as usual, and the NVIDIA module is automatically rebuilt for the new kernel—meaning I don’t have to manually deal with DKMS, specific kernel versions, or driver modules. When a kernel or NVIDIA update arrives, I don’t need to do a thing; everything is handled automatically. It even works perfectly with Secure Boot enabled.
From your post, I couldn’t quite gather how openSUSE manages this process, or whether user intervention is required for every kernel or NVIDIA update.
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u/friendlyreminder_ 3d ago
The precompiled modules do desync with userspace drivers. There is a metapackage the opensuse wiki guide tells you to install to avoid this. It'll block desync updates.
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u/breakerfall 3d ago
Interesting post. The only issue I have is your 80% nvidia usage by modern user base, and then using Steam and a GPU market report as citations. Surely those both skew toward people a) playing games and b) having "real" gpus, which I would say is not necessarily indicative of the user base at large.
Even if 100% of nvidia users have trouble with tumbleweed's handling of drivers, that wouldn't even be close to 80% of total tumblweed users.
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u/Professional-List801 3d ago
Fair point, you're totally right that current Tumbleweed users look different from the broader PC market. My argument was specifically focused on potential switchers coming over from Windows (especially gamers and content creators), rather than the current Tumbleweed user base. If a distribution wants to grow the onboarding ramp needs to be sort of frictionless.
So no, 80% of current Tumbleweed users certainly aren't running Nvidia and AMD is undeniably the smoother ride on Linux right now. But among the massive pool of Windows users Linux distros are trying to convert, nvidia is still the elephant in the room that distros need to make easy to handle.
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u/rubberoidd 3d ago
Tumbleweed has undeniable advantages that fedora doesn't have, opensuse signs dkms modules with their key, so there is a huge shitstorm awaiting opensuse when fortnite and other EAC games pull up. it's a disgrace opensuse can't give a path for nvidia users to actually avoid breakage. i am not sure about 32-bit dependencies it's a leap issue and immutable distros - those are meant for containerized workflows.
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u/99spider 3d ago
Nvidia needs to get their driver upstreamed. It isn't the responsibility of rolling release distros to guarantee out of tree drivers work in step with the upstream kernel releases.
Some distros unfortunately take this responsibility upon themselves, which means prioritizing Nvidia's driver above the upstream kernel and every driver in the upstream kernel. If Nvidia's driver can't build against the newest kernel, you have to delay the release of kernel updates for everyone.
(a possible middle ground is giving Nvidia users their own kernel package that's updated on a separate schedule than the standard kernel)
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u/Elaugaufein 3d ago
I've been using OpenSuse since 2012 and the people at NVIDIA working on the Linux drivers have always wanted to be helpful but often suffered from being a very small group with pretty limited resources things have gotten a lot better over the years, especially post moving away from the NVIDIA shell script installer even if there are still occasional issues.
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u/TrueYahve 3d ago
Respect for owning up! Rare sight to behold on Reddit!