Nvidia drivers
Ranked 3 of 8 graphics drivers by recommenders
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.
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.
78 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 25
- criticize it
- 53
- approval share
- 32%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 14 years
Median of the 4 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 25 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.4 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Recent drivers much improved
“Modern NVIDIA drivers for their more recent cards are actually okay, again.”
Comment from 31 Jan 2026 in “Guix System First Impressions as a Nix User” “NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year”
Comment from 2 Apr 2026 in “Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March” “Definitely better now with their new "opensource" driver.”
Comment from 2 Apr 2026 in “Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March” - Comment from 20 Mar 2026 in “Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years”
Works flawlessly for many users
“I've never had any issues with using the proprietary drivers on Arch on wayland in the past few years.”
Comment from 11 Jan 2026 in “Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet” “I haven't had any issues with NVidia's on the latest machine I built (like nothing).”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files” “I've had no more issues than running an AMD card and everything works flawlessly.”
Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March” - Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “Wayland Nvidia”
- Comment from 24 Apr 2026 in “Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Released”
- Comment from 29 Sep 2026 in “Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms”
First-party installer fixes many issues
“Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things.”
Comment from 1 Jan 2026 in “Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it” “Their installer script is actually pretty decent”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it” Newer driver solves specific bugs
“I had this issue which in my case was solved by installing a newer driver.”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “How to run Qwen 3.5 locally” “Make sure to use the 580.xx Nvidia driver.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features” “they responded promptly and fixed it”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “AMD GPUs Go Brrr”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Sleep and wake failures
“Now, everything mostly just works. The only thing I struggle with is sleep which seems to be permanently broke in the latest nvidia drivers.”
Comment from 20 Mar 2026 in “Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years” “whenever I update to the latest studio drivers which are supposed to be stable, the computer fails to wake up from sleep and hibernation”
Comment from 15 Sep 2026 in “Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste” “After years of wrangling their drivers, struggling to make sleep work, and getting X/Wayland rendering working reliably”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “The Myth of the ThinkPad” Reliability problems and bugs
“NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability”
Comment from 14 Sep 2026 in “Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste” “nvidia the primary offender there (they have at least two bugs affecting it across several driver versions)”
Comment from 20 Aug 2026 in “Linux 7.2 Released” “people are saying that NVidia can't deliver stable drivers for like 15 months”
Comment from 29 May 2026 in “Is This Sustainable?” Closed-source binary blob
“Nvidia is opening their source code because they moved most of their source code to the binary blob they're loading.”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'” “using nVidia's special-sauce installer taints the system in ways that distro tools deliberately seek to avoid”
Comment from 28 Sep 2026 in “Fakecloud: Local AWS cloud emulator for integration tests” “Nvidia's drivers are "open source" as there is a repository there but has only binaries”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Gemini 3” Missing Linux features and Vulkan
“the only outlier (NVIDIA) doesn't have all that great 'native' Vulkan support either (IME at least)”
Comment from 19 Oct 2026 in “macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL” “NVIDIA's drivers, which also have significant behaviour differences to the MESA drivers”
Comment from 3 Sep 2026 on Hacker News “But in Linux it's stuck at 8bpp due to nVidia driver not having 10-bit RGB output.”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it”
Other graphics drivers people recommend
The four most recommended other graphics drivers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA proprietary Linux drivers | 40 | 49 | 45% | 10 | 20 yrs9 owners | — |
| Mesa | 30 | 9 | 77% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Nvidia driversThis page | 25 | 53 | 32% | 9 | 14 yrs4 owners | — |
| amdgpu driver | 15 | 11 | 58% | 6 | — | — |
| ntsync | 11 | 3 | 79% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 89 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the only outlier (NVIDIA) doesn't have all that great 'native' Vulkan support either (IME at least)”
“their latest drivers often support very old cards”
“Nvidia drivers simply work”
“using nVidia's special-sauce installer taints the system in ways that distro tools deliberately seek to avoid”
“whenever I update to the latest studio drivers which are supposed to be stable, the computer fails to wake up from sleep and hibernation”
“NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability”
“NVIDIA's drivers, which also have significant behaviour differences to the MESA drivers”
“nvidia the primary offender there (they have at least two bugs affecting it across several driver versions)”
“I couldn't imagine Nvidia users having the same experience as me, even with their new drivers.”
“the nvidia support is not good enough if someone doesn't want to run Bazzite or Arch”
“Nvidia for example won't give you any support unless you use specific kernel versions on ubuntu”
“people are saying that NVidia can't deliver stable drivers for like 15 months”
“the open source nvidia by nvivia works just fine”
“Make sure to use the 580.xx Nvidia driver.”
“they've tried to keep up with the latest for a while”
“they've always worked very well for me”
“Nvidia is opening their source code because they moved most of their source code to the binary blob they're loading.”
“I've had no more issues than running an AMD card and everything works flawlessly.”
“Definitely better now with their new "opensource" driver.”
“NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year”
“Nvidia drivers are better than AMD.”
“Now, everything mostly just works. The only thing I struggle with is sleep which seems to be permanently broke in the latest nvidia drivers.”
“NVIDIA really started to work great only fairly recently”
“I had this issue which in my case was solved by installing a newer driver.”
“Modern NVIDIA drivers for their more recent cards are actually okay, again.”
“After years of wrangling their drivers, struggling to make sleep work, and getting X/Wayland rendering working reliably”
“575 dirver is working fine.”
“I've never had any issues with using the proprietary drivers on Arch on wayland in the past few years.”
“I haven't had any issues with NVidia's on the latest machine I built (like nothing).”
“Their installer script is actually pretty decent”
“But in Linux it's stuck at 8bpp due to nVidia driver not having 10-bit RGB output.”
“Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things.”
“Linux, at least with the official proprietary 580 series DKMS NVIDIA drivers doesn't seem to do this”
“NVIDIA's official stance is the DKMS 580 series drivers do support my card.”
“both of which worked without a single issue for me from the word "go"”
“the last major headache I've had in two and a half decades of being a Linux user - NVIDIA drivers - good riddance”
“Nvidia's drivers are "open source" as there is a repository there but has only binaries”
“With bad Nvidia support very often you can, there exist a lot of workarounds found by people.”
“they responded promptly and fixed it”
“But the issue is with NVIDIA. And my system is not mainly for gaming, so I'm stuck with NVIDIA”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.