this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Me installing Linux Mint on a 2022 laptop with a Nvidia GPU (had windows 11 preinstalled, this was an alongside install). I disabled secure boot at first, but still had to go all the way back and set up my MOK keys and turn on secure boot properly with another password to unlock the GPU.
Pro tip if you want to use Linux: don't rely on non-free drivers.
That's not a protip. A protip would be how you do that :D
Literally buy anything but Nvidia. Intel, AMD have upstream drivers that work regardless of secure boot. Various ARM platforms also have free drivers.
It used to be that there waa only bad choices, now there really is only one bad choice left.
Intel Arc still has some teething problems, particularly with power management on laptops, but AMD has been smooth sailing for almost a decade now.
Please help me understand why this is such a huge issue.
For many reasons. Nvidia requiring secure boot in this case, which is not available for all distros or kernels on all computers.
The other is requiring a workable kernel module and user space component from Nvidia, which means that as soon as Nvidia deprecates your hardware, you're stuck with legacy drivers, legacy kernels, or both.
Nvidia also has it's own separate userspace stack, meaning it doesn't integrate with the whole DRM & Mesa stack everyone else uses. For the longest time that meant no Wayland support, and it still means you're limited to Gnome only on wayland when using Nvidia AFAIK.
Another issue is switcheable graphics. Since systems with switchable graphics typically combine a Mesa based driver stack (aka everyone but Nvidia, but typically this would be AMD or Intel integrated graphics) with an Nvidia one, it involves swapping out the entire library chain (OpenGL or Vulkan or whatever libraries). This is typically done by using ugly hacks (wrapper scripts using LD_PRELOAD for example) and are prone to failure. Symptoms can be anything as mild as everything running on the integrated graphics, the discrete graphics never sleeping causing poor battery life or high power consumption, to booting to a black screen all or some of the time.
If these things don't bother you or you have no idea what these things mean, or you don't care about them or your hardware lasting more than 3-5y then it probably isn't a big deal to you. But none of the above exist when using Intel, AMD or a mix of those two.
In my experience the past twenty years, proprietary drivers are the root cause of I would say 90% of my issues using Linux.
When are people gonna learn to stop buying NVIDIA products?
Never heard of this before and couldn't find anything about secure boot being required to be enabled to use the Nvidia drivers with Linux.
But since you used dual boot you need to have secure boot enabled anyway, because win 11 would not work without it, would it?
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=343833
You can search duckduckgo for Nvidia mok secure boot mint and you'll see what I'm talking about.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/535434/what-exactly-is-mok-in-linux-for#535440
This is about signing the driver when secure boot is enabled. It doesn't say that Nvidia won't work with secure boot disabled.
I'm using Nvidia with debian and secure boot disabled btw. So the statement, "Nvidia won't work with secure boot disabled" is still wrong. Might be some Linux mint bug, but not a problem of Nvidia per se
fair enough, I had not tested any other distros, my bad.
I used fedora in 2022 with an Nvidia GPU and used the proprietary drivers just fine. Perhaps there was something different between your system and mine. Newer GPU perhaps? Mine was a 1080.
RTX3060, I suspect this is the case for newer laptops, yes.