Nvidia seems to be the biggest hurdle for most people. The simplest solution I’ve found has been universal Blue, Bazzite (specifically the Nvidia images). You don’t have to think twice about Nvidia as everything is preconfigured for you out of the gate, forever, in perpetuity.
People often repeat that Nvidia is a nightmare to get working and that you need to install some sort of pre-packaged distro that configures Nvidia for you but… that hasn’t been true for years?
Get any distro you want, from Fedora to Arch, install nvidia-open, reboot… that’s it? Maybe install extra packages for 32 bit support, video decoding and CUDA if you want, optionally. Not different from installing Nvidia drivers on Windows at all, except you’re not running a .exe, but that’s true for any package.
I believe one of the problems is that nvidia is an out of kernel driver so it requires each kernel update to rebuild it. There is a lot of distro’s that handle this with a proper configuration of dkms but some dont and it causes issues that are hard to solve for the average user.
Nvidia seems to be the biggest hurdle for most people. The simplest solution I’ve found has been universal Blue, Bazzite (specifically the Nvidia images). You don’t have to think twice about Nvidia as everything is preconfigured for you out of the gate, forever, in perpetuity.
I’m not aware of the x3d issues you speak of.
People often repeat that Nvidia is a nightmare to get working and that you need to install some sort of pre-packaged distro that configures Nvidia for you but… that hasn’t been true for years?
Get any distro you want, from Fedora to Arch, install nvidia-open, reboot… that’s it? Maybe install extra packages for 32 bit support, video decoding and CUDA if you want, optionally. Not different from installing Nvidia drivers on Windows at all, except you’re not running a .exe, but that’s true for any package.
I believe one of the problems is that nvidia is an out of kernel driver so it requires each kernel update to rebuild it. There is a lot of distro’s that handle this with a proper configuration of dkms but some dont and it causes issues that are hard to solve for the average user.
In my experience the version of Pop!OS with Nvidia support also works out of the box with no hassle.
I suspect the horror stories are from people who had to install the Nvidia support themselves.