I have a friend who I recently learned is looking to switch to Linux and I offered to help, since I’ve been using Linux for ages. I’m not the most technical user, but in some ways I think that makes me uniquely well suited to be a new person’s guide, and I’m pretty familiar with the install and setup process sans one big thing, proprietary graphics drivers, I’ve generally always been installing Linux on a laptop it an integrated gpu

They let me know they have an nvidia graphics card, I think 30 series if I remember right, we don’t know what DE or distro might be a good fit for them and I told them we’d start by test driving a few, see what they thought of the interfaces, and pick a distro from there

Can you boot and use the OS without installing the proprietary drivers, or do you need to install them via like tty or something? I know nvidia started open sourcing their drivers and some amount is in the kernel now, I assume proprietary drivers are still optimal, if not explicitly necessary?

Any and all advice is welcome, it’s kinda hard to research something this general and get a sense for what the big picture looks like

Thank you!

  • Zink
    5·
    21 hours ago

    I don’t see the Linux Mint gang in here yet, so here’s my input.

    My work PC is a Dell laptop with an Intel cpu and a discrete nvidia GPU. My home PC is a DIY desktop build with an Intel CPU and a GTX 1080. I have the latest version of Linux Mint Cinnamon running on both.

    Mint has a graphical driver manager that lets you switch between the FOSS driver and the official nvidia one. On 2D desktop either choice seems to work fine. I don’t think I’ve tried the FOSS driver in any games yet, but with the nvidia driver installed on my desktop, games with only Windows versions run pretty flawlessly using proton in Steam.

    Another consideration with Mint, other than it being full-featured and easier to install than windows, is the popularity of it and the stuff it builds off of like Ubuntu and the apt package management system. It means that whether you are a Linux beginner or an experienced user trying to do something new, any time you google “how to do X in Linux” it is almost certainly going to have instructions relevant to your system.

    Not that others are necessarily bad. For example, there’s the known high quality of the Arch wiki if you were thinking of something like EndeavorOS. And with SteamOS going Arch based, I could see such distros being in the majority after a while.

    • Cris@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      15 hours ago

      Yeah, I mentioned to them that if mint has the desktop they want it may be the best choice, thank you for sharing your experience

      • Zink
        1·
        14 hours ago

        If they are used to Windows, the default Cinnamon desktop uses the same UI & taskbar layout by default.

        But of course being Linux, you can customize it easily, or start with a different DE version of Mint (there are three) or just install something else. I’ve tried other DEs with different ways of interacting, like GNOME, but I think that having a single persistent taskbar on one of my monitors is the sweet spot for me.

        • Cris@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          13 hours ago

          I’m familiar with Cinnamon and mint, I installed the xfce version on a friend’s laptop about a year ago and have used, albeit briefly, both the cinnamon and mate versions. I’m here on the Linux for noobs comm mostly cause I have no idea about this part of the process, and am not super technical (at least in the Linux world; I’m pretty competent for other spaces 😅), in spite of having used Linux pretty exclusively for ages now (I’m mostly an art and design person :)

          GNOME is what I really enjoy personally but I’ll help them figure out which desktop seems like the right fit for them and then go from there

          Unless they pick gnome it seems likely I’ll recommend mint since my impression has been its a pretty well run project, but I’ve heard installing gnome on mint isn’t really recommended, so in that case I’ll probably go with fedora. I’m mostly just hoping to give them the most trouble free experience possible while they navigate all the new stuff that Linux entails :)

          It kinda sounds like I can just use the Foss drivers included in the kernel while test driving and figuring stuff out with them and then install the proprietary ones following a tutorial for whatever distro we end up with