Edit: So after an exciting evening of uninstalling drivers, rebooting, playing a round of CSGO and starting over, I can report that nothing is broken. I haven't tried much other than a handful of games though. In the end I removed the drivers in batches, uninstalling all versions of a major version together (all 515.*, then 520.*, then 525.* etc).
Of note is that all the drivers I removed were the 32 bit versions, since the 64 bit one updated properly. This is what's left of the drivers, I believe these are all actually needed and I'm not comfortable removing any of them (and even if they're not needed the space savings would be minimal anyway):
Name Application ID Version Branch Origin Installation
Mesa org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 23.1.1 22.08 flathub system
Mesa (Extra) org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 23.1.1 22.08-extra flathub system
nvidia-535-54-03 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-535-54-03 1.4 flathub system
Mesa org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.default 23.1.1 22.08 flathub system
Mesa (Extra) org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.default 23.1.1 22.08-extra flathub system
nvidia-535-54-03 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-535-54-03 1.4 flathub system
Original post:
Hello, I was wondering if anyone knows why flatpak keeps tons of Nvidia driver versions installed. Currently on my Fedora install I have:
Name Application ID Version Branch Origin Installation
nvidia-510-68-02 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-510-68-02 1.4 flathub system
nvidia-515-57 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-515-57 1.4 flathub system
nvidia-515-65-01 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-515-65-01 1.4 flathub system
nvidia-515-76 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-515-76 1.4 flathub system
nvidia-520-56-06 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-520-56-06 1.4 flathub system
nvidia-525-60-11 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-525-60-11 1.4 flathub system
nvidia-525-78-01 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-525-78-01 1.4 flathub system
nvidia-525-85-05 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-525-85-05 1.4 flathub system
nvidia-525-89-02 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-525-89-02 1.4 flathub system
nvidia-530-41-03 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-530-41-03 1.4 flathub system
nvidia-535-54-03 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-535-54-03 1.4 flathub system
A few months ago, when a new Nvidia update came out, usually what I'd do is update then run flatpak uninstall --unused, which would get rid of the older version no problem. As you can see, around driver version 510 this stopped working. If I try to remove them manually with eg. flatpak remove org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-510-68-02, I get this:
Info: applications using the extension org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-510-68-02 branch 1.4:
com.valvesoftware.Steam
Really remove? [y/n]:
My question is, is Steam actually using these drivers? Are these safe to remove? I'd like to get rid of them since they're bloating my root partition and updating 10 driver versions takes ages.
It would be interesting if you can share the results here, I am interested to see what happens.
Right now I've only removed the oldest driver, and steam opened fine. No complaints in it's terminal output. For now I'm going to test a few games and once I remove a few more versions I'll edit the post.