Hi to everyone. Been a while since I last posted here. Still enjoying Zorin OS. I may need to replace my AMD card with something else. I'm thinking of going back to NVIDIA, though. My question is, what is the situation right now with NVIDIA drivers? If I bought a NVIDIA card, can I expect it to be plug-and-play? Or will Zorin automatically detect that I'm using a NVIDIA card, and offer the necessary driver to use? Someone please advise; thanks. Much appreciated.
I wouldn't think that it is Plug 'n' Play because You have to install the Nvidia Driver. With AMD it is included in the Kernel. So, when you start it, it could be look a bit ... raw I guess. But when you have installed the Nvidia Driver it should work It think. Oh, and when You use a Nvidia card don't forget to change from Wayland to Xorg!
Most distributions will use Nouveau, but if it's an ultra modern card you intend to buy you might need to choose the option of installing with latest nvidia drivers at point of install.
So what happens when I put a NVIDIA card in the PC and I boot Zorin up? What happens? Will the driver section in the software update window have NVIDIA drivers ready to install? EDIT: Thanks.
Make sure you run on the nouveau drivers first before adding the nvidia card.
Follow-up: I still feel as though my original post hasn't been 100% answered. Suppose I put in a new video card. What actually happens, step by step? Will Zorin automatically detect my NVIDIA card, offer a driver update, etc?
Update: Found the answer to my own question.
Here's the link (CLICK HERE) if anyone's interested.
Thanks anyway.
I had to downgrade my Nvidia GT1030 to a GT440 to get PCLinuxOS installed. I didn't need nvidia drivers. If you are a gamer you need proprietary nvidia blobs. I've never had a good experience with nvidia when using their proprietary drivers, in particular with web browsers, even after turning off hardware acceleration. I stick with Nouveau. And when it comes to occasional gaming, I only play native Linux games these days.
Final update:
So I got a 3050 RTX 8 GB card. Thing is, after I tried to sign in to Zorin, the computer froze. I had to reboot into recovery mode to regain access to the desktop. At that point, I could select drivers, and picked the "tested" driver. I was able to sign back into Zorin normally after restarting. One odd thing was that my webcam wouldn't work afterwards. It wasn't until I opened the Software Center on a whim that I saw I had updates, and they were all for the GNOME environment. I ran the updates, rebooted, and presto, my webcam worked. So, all seems fine at this time. I'm providing this update in case if someone else runs into the same issue as I did, and is in need of a solution. Hope it helps someone. Thanks to all.
My Acer Nitro N5 with optimus and Gf1650ti works pretty well, after choose the Nvidia type for Zorin 17.2
Performance is equal to windows in FHD, fan speeds are auto adjusted. Good deal to play games with only 2GB memory usage for the os.