I have recently decided to go all in with openSUSE, and ended up with SlowRoll as a good balance between updates and stability.
I am familiar with the SUSE wiki articles to get nvidia drivers installed and tried to do my homework. I have followed -I think- all SUSE provided guides for open drivers or nvidia proprietary drivers that are based on SlowRoll repositories (I don’t want to introduce some foreign concepts in my installation straight from the nvidia website without the package manager being aware). I am aware about the need for nouveau blacklisting and verified it.
So far, nothing worked. The driver never ever loaded. When the driver module exists, I get errors that there is ‘no such device’. When installing the proprietary driver (using the repo) I get a bunch of dead symlinks in /lib/modules for the nvidia modules, e.g. for nvidia.ko. Furthermore I can see that there is no actual nvidia.ko file to be found anywhere in /lib/modules, only these symlinks which obviously means this can never work out.
I have -again- wiped it all out to start fresh, and can’t imagine me being the only one who is facing these issues.
So my question is, what are your experiences using nvidia on SlowRoll, and does anybody have a good, reliable, bullet proof guide that I can follow ?
It is a desktop pc with a GTX970 card, so no power switching on the card. All my attempts have been based on the G06 driver because this would be a Maxwell based card.
I can confirm it works/worked just fine on Windows, ubuntu/debian and archlinux, (“by the way”, please don’t take offense ;-)).
I run systemd-boot with secureboot enabled. The SELinux pattern is not installed but I do have some SELinux libraries and tooling installed as part of the regular installation I did (so not specifically installed by me):
Before I migrated to openSUSE I ran Ubuntu on this one, kernel 6.8 (so the LTS kernel before the current point release). Mesa I am not sure TBH. Arch was before that, on arch I always run the LTS kernel. I only mentioned it to make clear I am sure the hardware as such is ok.
So you install straight from nvidia then? I fear it could make the system less predictable if you mix package manager with “foreign” installation blobs, although it was what we had to do in “the early years”. Should I be less reluctant?
I don’t use secure boot, so if installing the hard way the kernel modules need signing. I’ve not had any issues the indicated hard way (been using it for a long time without issues), but my primary use for Nvidia is Prime Render Offload. I did plug in my monitors to it (RTX4000) the other day and it was all working fine.
I would suggest installing the G05 drivers via rpm and see how that goes. The days are numbered for your GPU, so if the G05 works, it should keep going for a longer time. Nvidia’s focus is on Turing+ these days with the open driver and GSP.
I will try out the G05 driver. I am still trying to grasp how this works exactly (e.g. whether dkms is involved etc) but it did not cross my mind the G05 would work for my model of card.
And indeed, it is quite old. I was hoping to run a smaller ML model on it for the heck of it. Gaming I must admit is Windows only these days, it seems Valve did great work on the Steam Deck but desktop gaming has suffered a lot imho. But that’s off-topic
@sam_vde So a hybrid system… I would use the Intel GPU as the primary GPU and then the Nvidia GPU for Prime Render Offload. It should work with switcherooctl, but you may get stuck with suse-prime instead, depending on you hardware…
The following 13 NEW packages are going to be installed:
libnvidia-egl-gbm1 libnvidia-egl-gbm1-32bit libnvidia-egl-wayland1 libnvidia-egl-wayland1-32bit libnvidia-egl-x111 libnvidia-egl-x111-32bit nvidia-common-G06
nvidia-driver-G06-kmp-longterm nvidia-gl-G06 nvidia-gl-G06-32bit nvidia-modprobe nvidia-video-G06 nvidia-video-G06-32bit
Information for package kernel-longterm:
Repository : update-slowroll
Name : kernel-longterm
Version : 6.12.13-1.1
Arch : x86_64
Vendor : openSUSE
Installed Size : 252,8 MiB
Installed : Yes (automatically)
Status : up-to-date
Source package : kernel-longterm-6.12.13-1.1.nosrc
Upstream URL : https://www.kernel.org/
Summary : The Linux Kernel
Description :
The Linux Kernel.
Source Timestamp: 2025-02-08 15:35:42 +0000
GIT Revision: 7dfb7ee6f3a31ba4eab9047901cea61382cd4afa
GIT Branch: slowroll
So it seems nvidia slowroll repository is not aligned with the slowroll distribution yet. I kind of assume this will be the tumbleweed kernel version which is slightly ahead. My system is up to date.
Assumptions for the time being, will investigate further.
I was running longterm, but nvidia only has packages for 6.12.16 and I can only get 6.12.18. So far no luck, the module does not get rebuild, and the open driver is unsupported for my card.
Still trying though, edging towards the nvidia binary kit now.
Some final notes now before I start experimenting with some local ML stuff:
thank you for your help, I love the linux community
I have not found any way to get nvidia drivers working using the longterm kernel, but I don’t think the default kernel will be too bleeding edge on Slowroll
