How reliable are NVIDIA drivers? Possible to use terminal only (no App stores)?

WyntechUmbrella

Hi all 👋. First, thanks for having me and for those of you that will have the patience to read my post.

I've been distro hopping quite a lot, and I fell in love with Solus. I love the stable rolling release, the reliability, simplicity, "personal computer first" approach. And the community seems fantastic. I feel like I'm ready to settle for a while 🙂.

However I have a bunch of questions first, sorry about that. I'm grateful for anyone that will take the time to answer those 🙏.

1) Regarding the NVIDIA drivers, I found several recent comments saying that currently things aren't reliable, even with the "normal" regular or open drivers (some comments also talked about black screens and instability). How stable are NVIDIA drivers on Solus currently? As reliable as with other distros or going through a rough patch?

2) I have an OMEN desktop with an RTX 4060 (and an Intel integrated GPU as well). On every other distro, the latest "open" kernel drivers have always worked best on my system. If I want to install those, should I just install the "nvidia-open-current" package and that's it? Any other kernel headers or else to add?

3) If I chose the "nvidia-open-current" drivers, will they upgrade automatically to a new branch (aka 590) when it will be released? Or does it requires manual changes?

4) When it comes to installing apps, updating and such I prefer using the terminal. However I see a heavy push towards using KDE Discover or GNOME Software on the documentations. Is deleting the stores and packagekit and only using the terminal possible or is it not recommended?

A thousand thanks to the team for this amazing distro and to the community for your answers (hopefully lol).

nolan

Hello and welcome to Solus.

WyntechUmbrella 3) If I chose the "nvidia-open-current" drivers, will they upgrade automatically to a new branch (aka 590) when it will be released? Or does it requires manual changes?

Usually updates are seamless, no user intervention is required, so I guess updating nvidia-open-current should be fine like any other update.

WyntechUmbrella 4) When it comes to installing apps, updating and such I prefer using the terminal. However I see a heavy push towards using KDE Discover or GNOME Software on the documentations. Is deleting the stores and packagekit and only using the terminal possible or is it not recommended?

Solus is "Designed for everyone" (https://getsol.us/), so you are not attached to just one way to install things, the "heavy push towards using KDE Discover or GNOME Software on the documentations" comes because recently Solus Software Center was deprecated (really old, writhen in python2 and needed a lot of work to implement flatpak or snapcraft) so they decided to replace it with GNOME Software for Solus with Gnome and KDE Discover for Solus with Budgie, Plasma and Xfce, mostly for regular users and newcomers.
Installing form terminal have always ben available, eopkg --hepl will bring you everything you can do with it, and there's a terminal ui that wraps eopkg it's called solseek by @Clintre and it's pretty cool.

Clintre

WyntechUmbrella

Welcome to the community!

Nvidia is quite stable on Solus and the team and community are happy to help if there are issues. The fact is we are dealing with Nvidia, but the teams takes great care to make sure what they put out there works.
I mainly use AMD on my desktops, but I have a Legion with a 4060 and I am using the open drivers along with the 32 bit drivers for Steam and it works great.
Yes it will update automatically.
Solseek is a tool I published. I built it originally for myself but then released it as a package as others liked the idea. Even if you do not like it, eopkg is a pretty easy packaging tool to use from the terminal, and the search is solid. That said, I would leave packagekit as there is some benefit to it being there. I actually use it even with Solseek for caching app info for desktop apps, but I use the native tools (eopkg, flatpak, etc) for the actual install, updates, etc.

Hope that helps! I love this community here. I actually found my way to Solus only a year ago, but have been using Linux since 92.

SethStorm666

Welcome!

Number 4 I can help you with. Have a look at https://discuss.getsol.us/d/12049-solseek-now-available
It's available via the repositiories. I would leave the store app alone, but that's just me. Then use Solseek.

WyntechUmbrella

SethStorm666 Will give it a look, thanks.

Axios

Welcome to the community!
I second sethstorm666 Recommendation
Solseek Puts a lot of the terminal stuff in one spot and it works really well.
And the Dev hangs around here so thats a plus.

WyntechUmbrella

Axios I've given it a try and it's definitely impressive. Love it! Thanks.

WyntechUmbrella

nolan Thanks for all these details. I have tried eopkg and it's intuitive and fast. Not to mention super clear when it comes to update details. I will definitely keep digging and learning.

nolan

Clintre since 92

that's a lifetime, great to see that 👍️

WyntechUmbrella

Clintre Thank you so much for taking the time to answer all my questions with such details, I'm really grateful. Honestly congratulations on your amazing job with Solseek, it's really these kind of apps that are the best: fast, efficient, straight to the point and without GUI bloating. This community is amazing, I will post a short reply to explain my experience as well.

JayC

Pretty much has all bee answered, but I am running a desktop with a 2070ti and a laptop with a 5060, both with the open driver and it has been smooth on Solus.

Agree with others on Solseek. I am not as much of a terminal user, but it has been so well done I no longer use Discover.

WyntechUmbrella

Just a quick update: I went up and installed Solus Plasma on my machine. Everything went smoothly, including the lengthy updates (kudos to eopkg for being so clear and detailed). NVIDIA drivers were indeed very fast and painless to install using the terminal, so far everything works as intended (despite being on Wayland). Solseek is a huge plus and should be installed by default (just my opinion).

I will keep learning and getting accustomed to my system, and I will come back either for help or to help others 😉.

Thank you all for your answers, I'm very grateful.