My Nvidia card is an RTX4060
This is a bit of a rant!
I have been using Neon for a while. An update “broke” my Nvidia driver, which I fixed.
Then another update “broke” the mount of other disks. It was workable but annoying.
I backed up lots of things and decided to go back to a fully fresh install of kubuntu.
Surprisingly, it installed with no problems. It installed the Nouveau driver and it seemed to work out of the box (no modeset needed).
But it didn’t.
Different parts of the driver just didn’t work. On the surface it looked good but the browser couldn’t display certain things.
Not to worry, I will just install the Nvidia driver. I couldn’t because some of the dependencies were missing (or paths were wrong) and I had neither the time or the inclination to work out why or how, i was somewhat pissed off at this point).
But it got worse.
Trying to install various programs seemed to work but either wouldn’t run or hung.
I think freedesk installed a server as an interface between the Nouveau driver and my hardware. This seemed to work for the install.
Actually a pretty smart idea.
But, it probably needed configurations for individual programs and that interfered with installations particularly in older programs.
Some USB mount points had …/freedesk/… in their path names and they always failed.
Eventually I went with a fresh install of neon (had to use modeset) and it installed flawlessly and I installed the Nvidia driver (version 550.120).
All is working fine.
Because I have a video card that is not yet fully functional with the Nouveau driver I can’t really say its a bug.
Neon is now the latest and it seems to be working flawlessly.
I find the various reasons for not sensing the Nvidia card at install time to be a bit spurious at best.
And yes I know the logic of having a universal open source graphics driver but until ALL the manufacturers fully contribute or support the open source driver, there will always be a lag between new hardware and software.
(the Nouveau driver I think should be treated as what it is, a graphic driver NOT as the greatest answer to the universe of graphics since sliced bread.
It is not yet a universal graphic card driver)
Having to use “nomodeset” at install time is undesirable but its a lot better than installing and just not working properly, and it not being apparent.
Windows does a couple of reboots at install time which I assume is to load “proper” drivers. It is no big deal.
KDE is a truly great concept. Not sure about locking in to a graphics card driver at install time that will almost certainly lag behind new hardware.
Perhaps Neon could consider “nomodeset” as an extra menu item on the installation disk with the explanation for late model graphic cards?
Yes you can just use the advanced option on the reboot screen, but generally you try normal boot wait a long time and fail, then do a reset & advanced boot.
Is that what new users really need to do?
There has been massive improvements & progress in the installations of the various flavors, but it seems to me the grub boot loader & the graphics driver are lagging.
Ubuntu installation seems to do it seamlessly.