It really depends on how the distro you’re using is integrating them and while installing them is usually the easy part, working around certain quirks they come with can be a bit tedious in my experience.

The proprietary driver comes in binary form and is shipped with a small kernel module that handles loading the binary driver. The Linux kernel modules that aren’t part of Linux itself (which most drivers are) must be compiled for specific kernel and its binary can work only for that specific kernel and nothing else. This means that even if then driver is the same but kernel changes, the nvidia module must still be recompiled. There are two ways distros handle that: 1) by running the compilation process in the background while installing or updating the driver package 2) by shipping binary form of the nvidia module, in case where it’s distro that always recommends synchronization of all packages so that kernel and modules always match. Historically this caused way more problems than it sounds, compilation might have failed for certain kernels occasionally leaving users with broken video after simple system update. Overall though it mostly works fine, especially nowadays.

Another quirk is that the user-space part of the driver that exposes OpenGL and Vulkan interfaces for applications are also proprietary and closed source, and they must also match exactly with the kernel part of the driver. This creates another problem for sandboxed applications using for instance Flatpak. Applications in container won’t use the system-wide libraries, but rather ship their own - and that’s by design for good reasons. Flatpak will automatically detect NVIDIA and install matching driver just fine, but then after installing system upades, you must always update your flatpaks as well or the ones that use GPU in any way will simply fail to launch or fall back to software rendering making it extremely slow. This doesn’t happen for open source drivers, because Mesa can work with basically any kernel, so Mesa in Flatpak can be in completely different version than the one installed as system package. Moreover, I experienced problems with storage space because Flatpak wouldn’t automatically remove old NVIDIA drivers and after a year or so it was a chunky pile of NVIDIA drivers.

And even when it works, there can still be missing functionality or integration with the OS might not be perfect. Last time I used them I was limited to X11 with many quirks regarding multi monitor setup and vertical synchronization. Wayland is technically usable now on NVIDIA, but not perfected yet.

Is that juice brand actually something available in Toronto area? That could tell us more if she’s telling the truth or not

Nice

It literally hasn’t changed even a tiny bit since I first saw it in 2006 :)

I currently use Strawberry - a well maintained fork of the old Amarok player before they redone the UI for KDE 4. It does what I care the most:

• Tree view collection with artist -> album grouping
• Files view
• Lyrics
• Tag editor
• Queue
• Last, but definitely not least - gapless playback

It’s Windows 95

The guy himself, a communist legend

Because it was. Only very late right before the project was killed they renamed it

It actually was merged just few days ago, I mean the color management protocol

You have to decide whether you want to be Linux app or GNOME app

On 6 you can have similar experience to Latte with just the panel minus the animations and some of its customizations

Tweaks and preconfigured distros aren’t solution here. The driver is still lacking certain features and that can only be fixed by NVIDIA

I love how pacman/libalpm database is just directories with tiny little files, and it’s faster in resolving dependencies than mostly anything else

Now that you can get latest software from Flathub, there’s really nothing wrong with Debian “stable” except for more recent hardware support that requires newer kernel at the very least (recent userspace drivers will also come from Flatpak if the software like Steam is also a Flatpak). That is, if the stable repo has all you need and there’s no reason to supplement it with external packages.

There are however perfectly valid reasons for going with rolling to get recent improvements, which I for one care about. For example, now that PipeWire is pretty mature, Debian 13 will ship good version and it will serve well for the next 2-3 years, but some 2 years ago it was really important to get the latest and greatest to have good experience - and even early it was better than PulseAudio would ever be, just still improving rapidly, not ready for full freeze. Other example - KDE Plasma improved significantly from version 6.0 onwards introducing long awaited functionality like fractional scaling, HDR, but also improved stability and general polish. It will only be introduced in Debian 13, one full year after it was introduced.

Lastly, there’s nothing wrong with rolling and it isn’t really “unstable”. Using Arch full time for the last 12 years, I only had like 2-3 situations when update actually broke something and it wasn’t my misconfiguration or a skill issue. Even then it could easily be avoided by using linux-lts kernel. In fact my Debian/Ubuntu installs were much less stable as there was always something missing that I needed (in era before Flatpaks or AppImages especially) relying on 3rd party apt repos, causing breakages and conflicts. I would usually upgrade Debian to testing or unstable anyway, so rolling, but one that’s actually open for breakage.

It’s not even that he “shows” anything. These videos are AI generated based on common search queries automatically

My bet is it tries to default to mode that your display doesn’t like, probably because of some wrong info in monitor’s EDID downloaded from the connector, but that’s just my guess.

Before booting, use key e on grub menu, locate line where there is initrd to pass boot parameters. You can force modes using video= parameter, and you can also replace/modify your EDID. Refer to section # Forcing modes and EDID on this page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_mode_setting

These changes can also be achieved permanently by editing /etc/default/grub and regenerating its configuration, in case you use grub.

Easiest would be to have separate extra monitor temporarily or another computer to connect over SSH, but if those low “safe” graphics modes work, that can probably do also.

Ahoj! No access to swamp

Screw distros, just use Arch

There was a car wash service nearby where I lived, it was places at the end of supermarket parking lot. They got luxury Dodge Challenger car to polish its rims. An employee of that car wash decided to take a ride and crashed the car on a tree. He didn’t even have driving license.

Link in Polish, there are pictures, use translator for details: https://wroclaw.naszemiasto.pl/pracownik-myjni-rozbil-na-drzewie-luksusowe-auto-klienta/ar/c1-7527497

If you call 5 year period “a break” then sure, it’s a break. I don’t think it makes what I said any less valid just because I went back to it. It can happen if you loose attention on that problem, and it’s easy when it’s no longer a problem

Quitting isn’t very hard if you’ve got a valid reason, determination and, most importantly, you set your mind properly. Don’t do “strong will” quitting where you force yourself to go through painful experience of quitting, but you don’t fully understand why you have to. Your mindset is the key - if you start to truly believe you don’t need tobacco and there’s not much that you sacrifice by quitting, it comes naturally and you can call yourself a non-smoker from day 1. You must be certain that there won’t be any reasons to feel there is something missing, you no longer have your daily ritual, you don’t have chat with smoking coworkers or you don’t know what to do with your hands. No matter how hard it sounds to imagine now, as a non-smoker you cannot care less. The typical imagination on how hard it is to change habits or how nothing is the same after that change, you must remember that your mind projects that to you in a very hyperbolic way. Same goes as the physical aspect of nicotine addiction - some say that your body would absolutely freak out if you suddenly remove nicotine from it. For the most part, this is utter bullshit. Yes, you can totally perceive nicotine hunger, but it’s there only for as long as there’s some nicotine left in your body. You only need 10-14 days to get rid of all of the nicotine and that’s it. In practice the hunger isn’t even as bad as smokers typically make it out to be. The mental addiction is much harder, because if you stay addicted and keep feeling as you were robbed out of something you liked, you can go back to it even after long time, even if cigarettes taste like shit and make you sick to the stomach and you want to vomit and poo at the same time.

I’ve quit smoking multiple times, sadly you can go back to it after some time if you decide to experiment with it to maybe teach yourself to be “casual smoker” (which you won’t be, believe me), or like in my case smoking weed mixed with tobacco has put me right back in nicotine addiction. I’ve quit smoking 2 years ago now, I was sick of that shit.