# Nvidia drivers 25 Hacker News commenters recommended Nvidia drivers and 53 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 14 years (4 owners). **Verdict:** Many Linux users say recent Nvidia drivers work well, especially the first-party installer. The most common caveat is sleep and wake failures, plus closed-source binaries. ## Why people recommend it - Recent drivers much improved (4 comments): "Modern NVIDIA drivers for their more recent cards are actually okay, again." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46837997)) "NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47610110)) "Definitely better now with their new "opensource" driver." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47611616)) - Works flawlessly for many users (6 comments): "I've never had any issues with using the proprietary drivers on Arch on wayland in the past few years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573873)) "I haven't had any issues with NVidia's on the latest machine I built (like nothing)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527426)) "I've had no more issues than running an AMD card and everything works flawlessly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47623508)) - First-party installer fixes many issues (2 comments): "Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459185)) "Their installer script is actually pretty decent" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460077)) - Newer driver solves specific bugs (3 comments): "I had this issue which in my case was solved by installing a newer driver." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47296783)) "Make sure to use the 580.xx Nvidia driver." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125973)) "they responded promptly and fixed it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936732)) ## What people warn about - Sleep and wake failures (3 comments): "Now, everything mostly just works. The only thing I struggle with is sleep which seems to be permanently broke in the latest nvidia drivers." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449366)) "whenever I update to the latest studio drivers which are supposed to be stable, the computer fails to wake up from sleep and hibernation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708246)) "After years of wrangling their drivers, struggling to make sleep work, and getting X/Wayland rendering working reliably" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644324)) - Reliability problems and bugs (3 comments): "NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704129)) "nvidia the primary offender there (they have at least two bugs affecting it across several driver versions)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49380187)) "people are saying that NVidia can't deliver stable drivers for like 15 months" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321703)) - Closed-source binary blob (3 comments): "Nvidia is opening their source code because they moved most of their source code to the binary blob they're loading." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47749460)) "using nVidia's special-sauce installer taints the system in ways that distro tools deliberately seek to avoid" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49877249)) "Nvidia's drivers are "open source" as there is a repository there but has only binaries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45975564)) - Missing Linux features and Vulkan (3 comments): "the only outlier (NVIDIA) doesn't have all that great 'native' Vulkan support either (IME at least)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50150341)) "NVIDIA's drivers, which also have significant behaviour differences to the MESA drivers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49547451)) "But in Linux it's stuck at 8bpp due to nVidia driver not having 10-bit RGB output." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459727)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [NVIDIA proprietary Linux drivers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nvidia-proprietary-linux-drivers.md): 40 recommend - [Mesa](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mesa.md): 30 recommend - [amdgpu driver](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amdgpu.md): 15 recommend - [AMD graphics drivers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amd-graphics-drivers.md): 9 recommend - [Nouveau driver](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nouveau.md): 8 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Nvidia drivers", https://hackerapproved.com/p/nvidia-drivers/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).