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Just got a new GPU, why is it so hard to use it?
(slrpnk.net)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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No its not. The nvidia 5070 works on linux and has for a while now.
We really need to avoid just suggesting a different distro as the solution. In this case it makes no sense, they're running kernel 6.14 and the Nvidia driver is out of kernel. Phoronix benchmarked the 5070 running an older version of ubuntu and still got good performance and it worked well. That means their version of ubuntu which is new enough to support it. Im not sure what the issue is but I think switching distro's is a last resort once you've tried everything else.
In this case, a different distro is the exact thing to be suggested. They are looking for out of the box support functionally speaking.
Which case if they want something that is newer than they really should be on a distro that is focused on newer support. Such as Arch or Fedora. Ubuntu, mint and other distros based on Debian all share the same problem of depending on where you are in the release cycle, you can be wildly out of date. Even if you have a newer colonel, there can be weird. Incompatibility and funky problems that occur.
Generally speaking, there is a very good reason why every single distribution that is focused specifically on video card support, gaming modern hardware is Arch or fedora based.
Frankly, for a lot of normal users who aren't used to Linux or just want things to work out of the box with no fiddling and good documentation. Then they really should just be avoiding Debian and Ubuntu base distributions.
They're great if you have newish but a couple years old hardware and you just want something that is Rock solid out of the box and you don't plan to ever fiddle with it.
But for someone running a 5080 and likely is gaming, they should just be on cachy or bazzite. We're installing your drivers setting up proton setting up steam, setting up everything. A gamer or someone trying to do any sort of advanced graphical s*** is quite literally a one-button process. With the dev team working on the distribution explicitly going out of their way to make sure the support for new hardware is as seamless and stupid proof as possible.
I completely disagree with all your reasons but im sick of arguing this. My answer is the same as previous comments. Ubuntu works with this hardware and its up to date thus distro is not the issue.
"it works on Linux" isn't black and white. My 2070 would not work with freerdp in full screen and nouveau drivers. It works with Nvidia drivers, though.
Great but it's not working out of the box and clearly that was the expectation.
AMD has built in support so no extra steps needed.
Ubuntu has a history of not having the latest kernels and having spotty support for new hardware.
Sure you can fix it but again the out of the box expectation.
We can agree that it should work and can work and I don't disagree that always suggestions a different distribution is not generally helpful but watching people suffer trying to get Ubuntu working is a sore spot for me.
Its not an out of the box installation. He has an existing ubuntu installation and is upgrading the GPU. We can always be like oh you ran into a single issue, just get rid of your hardware and swap to an entirely new distro. Thats a worst case solution to the problem.
Doesnt matter, he isnt asking about an AMD card.
Its actually the opposite, ubuntu generally has very good hardware support. Cannonical work with vendors to test hardware works on their platform. The 5070 phronix benchmarks were done on ubuntu. Suggesting its a distro issue is ignoring the problem