nVidia driver package question

English Hardware
1

I am confused about the nVidia driver package. I thought it was a “regular” package. I added the nVidia repository with zypper and installed it. Later, it was upgraded by zypper from version 450.57 to 450.66.

However, I was dealing with a problem in another application that I had installed as a Flatpak. When I ran “flatpak list”, the output says that the nVidia drivers (both versions) are flatpaks. This was a surprise to me. Is it correct?

Here is the flatpak command output:

Name                                            Application ID                                    Version            Branch         Installation          
PulseEffects                                    com.github.wwmm.pulseeffects                      4.8.0              stable         system
Spotify                                         com.spotify.Client                                1.1.26.501         stable         system                
Freedesktop Platform                            org.freedesktop.Platform                          19.08.12           19.08          system                
default                                         org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                                  19.08          system                
nvidia-450-57                                   org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-450-57                            1.4            system
nvidia-450-66                                   org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-450-66                            1.4            system
openh264                                        org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264                 2.1.0              2.0            system
GNOME Application Platform version 3.36         org.gnome.Platform
2

Hi
What about the output from;


zypper se -si *nvidia*
3

Flatpak packages are completely distinct from RPM packages (zypper). The nvidia flatpak packages exists so sandboxed apps can access the GPU, the user-mode part of nvidia needs to be available inside the sandbox as well, and they need to match the nvidia package in the host system.

4

Thank you, @awerlang. That makes sense.