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A bit offtopic... are there any distros besides PoPOS that comes with the proprietary Nvidia drivers preinstalled? I tried to use (live image) Debian on an RTX

A bit offtopic... are there any distros besides PoPOS that comes with the proprietary Nvidia drivers preinstalled? I tried to use (live image) Debian on an RTX 4070 PC and nothing worked just black screen after GRUB. PoPOS works out of the box but honestly I'd prefer something more simple as Debian.

yrro 3y ago
How does PoPOS accomplish this without violating the license of the kernel and the NVIDIA drivers?
- dezgeg 3y ago
  The sad truth is the license of non-GPL Linux kernel modules is very rarely cared about nor enforced. There are ton of embedded devices that don't bother with the NVIDIA shim scheme but ship with straight proprietary .ko:s on the device.
- chungy 3y ago
  Since it is a distribution by a hardware vendor that ships NVIDIA GPUs, I'll assume that they got a licensed from NVIDIA to ship their operating system with the proprietary drivers.
  - yrro 3y ago
    Possibly, but what about the license of Linux? Surely nvidia.ko (being a derived work of both the GPL-licensed Linux kernel and the proprietary NVIDIA kernel object files) is non-distributable? Otherwise why does every other distribution faff around with akmods/DKMS, etc?
noisy_boy 3y ago
I have been thinking of switching to Debian from Pop!_OS and have a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2 with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 - if graphics drivers are an issue, then my wish is dead in water.
- paines 3y ago
  Why preinstalled? They are not even preinstalled on PoPOS. If you choose nvidia via powermanagement and they aren't installed, only then they will be downloaded and installed..... If you think of the hazzle because of offloading (intel by default and nvidia by demand) just purge bumblebee(at least that was the issue before boowkworm) and you have mostly the same experience.
- winrid 3y ago
  I would play with the livecd for a while first. Even straight ubuntu gave me problems on my gen1 (wifi, sleep, graphics...). I switched it back to win10 and have a Carbon for Linux now.
  - noisy_boy 3y ago
    Makes sense. I went with the Extreme model because I needed to drive one 4K + two HD monitors from it and was under the impression that Intel XE graphics are not sufficient for it - happy to be corrected on this front (Nvidia has been nothing but trouble on Linux).
m463 3y ago
A lot of times you can fix boot issues like this by adding "nomodeset" to the boot command line I always had trouble booting proxmox the first time, because even though it is a server os with no graphics, the installer is graphical. I would get black screen at boot. I would just interrupt hte boot use 'e' to edit the command line, add 'nomodeset' and it would boot.

yrro 3y ago

How does PoPOS accomplish this without violating the license of the kernel and the NVIDIA drivers?

dezgeg 3y ago
The sad truth is the license of non-GPL Linux kernel modules is very rarely cared about nor enforced. There are ton of embedded devices that don't bother with the NVIDIA shim scheme but ship with straight proprietary .ko:s on the device.
chungy 3y ago
Since it is a distribution by a hardware vendor that ships NVIDIA GPUs, I'll assume that they got a licensed from NVIDIA to ship their operating system with the proprietary drivers.
- yrro 3y ago
  Possibly, but what about the license of Linux? Surely nvidia.ko (being a derived work of both the GPL-licensed Linux kernel and the proprietary NVIDIA kernel object files) is non-distributable? Otherwise why does every other distribution faff around with akmods/DKMS, etc?

noisy_boy 3y ago

I have been thinking of switching to Debian from Pop!_OS and have a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2 with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 - if graphics drivers are an issue, then my wish is dead in water.

paines 3y ago
Why preinstalled? They are not even preinstalled on PoPOS. If you choose nvidia via powermanagement and they aren't installed, only then they will be downloaded and installed..... If you think of the hazzle because of offloading (intel by default and nvidia by demand) just purge bumblebee(at least that was the issue before boowkworm) and you have mostly the same experience.
winrid 3y ago
I would play with the livecd for a while first. Even straight ubuntu gave me problems on my gen1 (wifi, sleep, graphics...). I switched it back to win10 and have a Carbon for Linux now.
- noisy_boy 3y ago
  Makes sense. I went with the Extreme model because I needed to drive one 4K + two HD monitors from it and was under the impression that Intel XE graphics are not sufficient for it - happy to be corrected on this front (Nvidia has been nothing but trouble on Linux).

m463 3y ago

A lot of times you can fix boot issues like this by adding "nomodeset" to the boot command line I always had trouble booting proxmox the first time, because even though it is a server os with no graphics, the installer is graphical. I would get black screen at boot. I would just interrupt hte boot use 'e' to edit the command line, add 'nomodeset' and it would boot.