Linux

It sorta depends. I've personally had some issues with certain software (mainly Firefox) running in Wayland on my Nvidia card. There are environment variables and flags to remedy some issues, but I'd still get the occasional application crash.

What worked well for me was setting up prime offloading so basically all of the system runs on the integrated GPU and only games run on Nvidia.

(Not mint)* On arch i used the arch install script, selected the nvidia drivers, and it just worked. I did have to spend some time making sure sure my nvidia gpu was my primary gpu and not my integrated graphics (cpu), but that was the biggest hurdle

On EndeavourOS, you just have to run nvidia-inst. Mint has the driver manager, and other distros have ways of handling it. For your card, you'll want the Nvidia Open driver if it doesn't do it automatically.

TLDR: These days it's easy.

A few years ago when I went to actually use the GPU in my laptop I realized I never installed the drivers. I think it was a 3050 or something pretty low end.

It took maybe 20 minutes, most of that time was waiting for things to install. I've heard the horror stories so I wasn't excepting it to work and was ready to give up at the first sign on resistance but there really wasn't any. That was on Fedora, a bit later I switched to Debian and I remember running into an issue getting it to work but it was small enough that I don't remember what the issue was.

I've had a couple of computers with Nvidia cards and all I ever had to do was install the driver from the package manager and reboot. I always had screen tearing issues with them, but that was with cards from 2011 & 2013. I would hope that they've fixed that by now.

The complaints are more about lack of support for OS drivers. If using proprietary drivers is not a worry. Then they are fine. Often the OS stuff works if your set up is simple.

My advice. Do not upgrade to quickly. They tend to have errors in their new proprietary drivers. Watch and see how others have done. Before upgrading essential machines.

The other issue. For non rendering. Their latest models performance to £$ etc is getting very bad. But blender still has major speed advantages on Nvidia. But that is looking more and more short term as blender grows.

Im using a 3080, nobara and bazzite have worked flawlessly for me so far though im semi active in the bazzite community and a few people have varying issues with nvidia from what ive seen. Usually the issues are a little more edge case like game streaming but with a particular set up

I had a 1060 for a good few years that I used primarily with Arch and never really had an issue. At the time it didn't play nicely with Wayland, so I was still using Xorg instead, but I think that's a solved issue by now. Nvidia just doesn't support newer features as readily as AMD does it seems. It really should have no bearing on your ability to play games.

The main difference is your mileage may vary with Nvidia, whereas it's pretty much always just going to work with AMD. But give it a shot and see how it goes. Make sure to choose a distro that specifically supports Nvidia.

I imagine a 4060TI is a relatively valuable card that you could trade for AMD if you really wanted to.

I just had to install the NVIDIA proprietor drivers from Software on Fedora and reboot and it worked no problem. NVIDIA also has better software support for ML, so you're fortunate to have an NVIDIA card.

If you just want to do pedestrian activities like gaming and desktop stuff, you're fine with the average nvidia driver install tutorial, and it's pretty trivial.

If you want more niche or advanced features like HDR tuning in Wayland or using cuda applications, you may want to consider that amd drivers are actually open and allow you to get into those kinds of tunables.

That said, there are still features and performance kept away from the user with nvidia, despite their never-ending promises of making drivers open, and nvidia has been rewarded for being not open on Linux, which a lot of us don't like. I personally am one of those and my stance with nvidia is partly one of principle.

the ONLY issues I've ever had with my Nvidia GPU were with A. Sway and B. Mint.

and when I say "issues" with Sway it was simply not being able to use a DM to login to it and having to login via TTY with "sway --unsupported-gpu" since the Sway devs aren't fans of proprietary stuff at all.

for Mint...just didn't work well for gaming. Crashing, slow downs, etc. That could either be a Distro issue or a Me issue as Mint was my first linux distro and I only stuck with it for a couple weeks before moving on to CachyOS.

On every distro since then? zero issues. it just works. Best experience with it was probably via CachyOS or NixOS. Runs smooth as silk on NixOS.

It's easy to install nVidia drivers nowadays. The real issues will be using them. Maybe I just got a bad card, but maybe nVidia is actual garbage. I don't know.

Check my history but basically no. It's not so hard.

I'm on Debian stable yet place the latest games, from VR to flat ones, from AAA to indies, and it just works.

Maybe I spent 30min https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers months ago (years now? time flies) when I did my install and since then smooth sailing. I have minor issues, e.g. suspend sometimes hang. Sometimes coming back from sustain some visual glitches in the browser via WebGL, but that's it.

Edit: I sometimes also use the GPU for CUDA for local AI/LLM (mostly to make sure it's bullshit, and it is but at least I can say I tried) and that also went well, just followed instructions.

This is the biggest hurdle nowadays with Nvidia:

NVIDIA GPUs generally experience a performance penalty when running DirectX 12 games on Linux, with reports indicating a drop of 15-30% compared to Windows. This is largely attributed to driver optimizations and the overhead from using translation layers like Proton and Wine.

No, it’s not hard. By default open source drivers will run, but you can install the nvidia ones through driver manager and everything should just work.

My Nvidia works flawlessly. It’s only a 1060gtx but I’m running 570 drivers and the only real issue is it’s not open source.

With some certain distros, it is easy.

i use nobara linux and it was literally working out of the box

will it work? probably. will you have to downgrade more often than any other GPU vendor? also probably

Its pretty straightforward. You just need to have secureboot disabled in bios so a third party driver can load.

Currently have 2 machines on MX with nvidia cards. One was flawless from the get go the other took some trail and error by installing some extra packages but I got there.

(Through the package manager I might add, no files edited or anything)

Mint has a somewhat similar user experience. Chances are you’ll be just fine. Try out a live usb.

You can try a distro that includes the driver on installation to avoid a some of the headache. I have a 4060ti and I'm using Cachyos with zero issues.

My main workstation runs Debian and has a 3090. No issues that I'm aware of. When I used to use Mint, I think I remember Mint having a GUI to easily select the Nvidia driver you want to use, so it was very easy. In Debian, you just have to run ~10 commands in shell to install the proprietary Nvidia driver. I have an older laptop with an Nvidia GPU too; that one is more annoying because I don't think any distro supports integrated/dedicated GPU auto-switching (I just have it set to use the Nvidia GPU all the time).

If the recommendations for Mint do not work, I'd try a different distribution with an easier path to install nvidia drivers, namely one that has the open nvidia drivers included in the ISO.

PopOS and Ubuntu do this.

I'd avoid CachyOS for Linux newbs as it is bleeding edge and can be difficult to manage.