A suggestion to the Tumbleweed userdocs: Nvidia proprietary drivers

So I installed Tumbleweed KDE using an ISO image: openSUSE Tumbleweed KDE LiveCD.

Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20260616
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.27.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.0.12-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon Graphics
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM (15.5 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU
Manufacturer: LENOVO
Product Name: 82JU
System Version: Legion 5 15ACH6H

I installed this ISO with my laptop in ‘dynamic mode’, which basically allows me to use integrated AMD graphics, which I always do with my linux installs to ease the installation of a distro.

All good, it installs, then I go ahead into YaST (first time, never used this tool before). When going into Software Management, a selection of NVIDIA packages is selected for me. This is not mentioned in the docs, but I thought it was good. Rebooted laptop into ‘discrete mode’ (a.k.a nvidia only).

It turns out that the suggested packages for my card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile is not good, because it selects nvidia-glG06 and that misses functionality for my laptop display brightness and after reboot somehow by wallpaper was reset. It also installed mokutils, which although I have used before, I did not expect to have to go through that and didn’t know what to press (though I saw the userdocs were still WIP for that, so I’m guessing that a step-by-step tutorial on mokutil enrolling is already in the works). I don’t care much for secureboot so I removed mokutils package and turned off secure boot.

After some troubleshooting, and knowing that my Debian install used way higher nvidia-driver versions (610), I decided to try a higher nvidia-driver version and removed all nvidia packages except firmware. Then I installed glG07 which was not mentioned in the docs, specifically:

 sudo zypper install nvidia-open-driver-G07-signed-kmp-meta

Now everything works exactly like on my Debian install, display brightness working and external displays working great again.

PS:
I also tried this:

sudo zypper install-new-recommends --repo https://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/tumbleweed

It was mentioned as a CLI installation option in the docs, but that installed G06 as well, which got me the same problem again with my display brightness. So G07 is the way.

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Welcome to openSUSE and to the Forums!
The main references for Nvidia drivers are SDB:NVIDIA_drivers and https://sndirsch.github.io/nvidia/2025/07/16/nvidia-drivers.html
Please be aware that S. Dirsch is the maintainer of Nvidia packages for openSUSE.

Scrolling down the SDB article you will find advice about mokutil.
Scrolling down to “Known Issues” on Stefan’s blog article you will find advice about what you witnessed: the Nvidia repo still holds all drivers and with some cards old G06 drivers built before G07 were released are automatically selected, unfortunately.

Have fun with openSUSE.

Thankyou for the correct links and explanation! I have mistaken myself I noticed. I looked at https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/tumbleweed/ and missed the notice about

:warning: Warning
This documentation has not been deployed to its destination yet. In the meantime, please prefer the sources below.

I must have missed it because I was looking up documentation yesterday evening and I was tired (a classic way to overlook things).

Now I found that I found the actual wiki I must say I am very impressed with this distro. I’ve been going through different distros the past 1,5 years and this installation and setup (especially the YaST tool) feel really comfortable. Other things I found impressive:

  • Because I selected disk encryption, it set up autologin for SDDM so that I don’t have to authenticate twice in a row. This is exactly what I want.
  • NVIDIA repositories were enabled by default, I only had to install them. It must have detected that I used an NVIDIA card and enabled them. It’s a nice attention to detail. Every distro that doesn’t ship NVIDIA with their ISO should do this in my opinion!
  • Forum has my native language as a category, which really feels like a luxury. Also feels like this setup of Discourse I’ve seen is done really professionally, not just a slap-on thing like some other distros.
  • Theming of KDE plasma feels right, not too opinionated, yet fitting with the green tones of openSUSE.

Before you grow too fond of YaST please be aware that it is on its way out (sadly) because maintenance is becoming a nightmare.
Some modules are already withdrawn, others still work (until they don’t) and others might work according to old standards (good for compatibility with old systems but not the way to go for a fresh install).
For software management use myrlyn which is basically a rewrite of YaST2-Software; you might have it already installed by default.
Other system configurations now rely on Cockpit, see new-launcher-aims-to-simplify-cockpit-installations for a starter.

Feel free to ask if you need further advice.

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I see, thanks for the heads up. I will look into using cockpit, it seems to be the alternative I want that does the neat GUI for configuring the boot loader, that is in particular what I really appreciate about YaST at the moment.