For some reason, i only have the choice of installing Nvidia-390 in the DoFlicky driver manager. On other distros, driver versions up to 440 work just fine.

  • yes i did fully update and then reboot after installing solus (budgie)

You didn't mention your card. So I can only speculate on what has happened based on past experiences.

I assume nvidia dropped support for your card in newer releases past a certain 440 point release. So 440 releases past that point release do not work on your card. Leaving the 390 series as the latest driver series to continue getting updates and still supports your card.

Other distributions may decide to keep that specific 440 driver around as long as it works for the kernel they're using. Leaving the user unsupported by nvidia with future kernel updates potentially breaking compatibility with that driver and without any possibility of subsequent bug fixing releases as no newer 440 release will support your card.

Solus is a rolling release, which makes supporting such things harder compared to Ubuntu LTS releases. Things are more likely to break, if upstream stop supporting it. It should be pointed out for example that Solus only supports drivers that support the latest linux-current kernel (currently 5.6.4) / are still supported by nvidia. Which is why the 340 series was dropped, nvidia stopped supporting it and it didn't support kernels past 5.4.x

Or
Something has gone wrong in hardware detection. I can't say because you didn't mention what card you have.

    dbarron

    Harvey Hey, thank you for the quick response. My GPU is an Nvidia GT 920m, my laptop has an intel gpu too though. i did try out the 390 driver but it has poor performance and it's impossible to turn on Prime Sync (trust me, I tried so many things). i saw there's a glx driver called "current" in the software center, so I'll try to do a fresh install and try it out.

          irabz

          I wouldn't suggest installing drivers from the repository that you are not sure will work on your card. You'll boot to a blank screen with a blinking _

          Latest 440 series does not list the 920m as being supported.

            Hey guess what! It booted just fine, the drivers are working. They did work on Pop!_OS too, so I don't see why they wouldn't work here. I do generally hate ubuntu-based distros so that's why I'm trying out Solus (Love the Budgie DE btw).
            The only issue i'm still having is that Prime Sync is still turned off, and since I don't want to brick my system again trying to turn it on (I don't have the option to do it in the Nvidia-settings), do you have any suggestions?

              irabz
              I'm afraid I do not. I don't even understand why nvidia stopped listing the 920M as being supported past 430.40 if it works.

                  Harvey
                  Yeah, that's weird. The reason why I want to turn on Prime Sync is because I have screen tearing. Is it because I have two GPU's? I would prefer to be able to only use the Nvidia GPU, but my BIOS doesn't offer that option.

                      irabz
                      Generally screen tearing with nvidia would be fixed by enabling full composition pipeline in nvidia-settings but for PRIME users (mobile) nvidia don't make it easy.
                      Run:
                      echo "nvidia-drm.modeset=1" | sudo tee /etc/kernel/cmdline.d/50-nvidia-drm.conf
                      sudo clr-boot-manager update

                      reboot

                      For Firefox tearing enable gfx.webrender.all inside about:config

                      I can't promis this will work for you, because according to nvidia it shouldn't work at all.

                        That actually turned it on! Thank you so much, I guess I can finally stop distro-hopping : D