it’s 2025, what popular distro makes it not easy?
idk about 2025 but as of a few years ago, Slackware used to not have a dependency resolver in whatever it uses to download packages. You had to resolve dependencies manually.
Luckily I switched to Gentoo and 3 years later after my system was done compiling, it was already out of date so when I used emerge to update my system, it borked itself because it was so out of date.
For nvidia? Alpine Linux. It’s so hard there is 0 support outside of nouveau
(I mean, Alpine uses MUSL instead of GLIBC, so expected)
For AMD? doas apk add linux-firmware-amdgpu mesa mesa-tools vulkan-loaders xf86-video-amdgpu There, you’re good to go(wiki also tells you that)
- Use a DIY distro made for containers
- Cry about having do DIY
Merkste selber
Slackware’s package manager is extremely easy to use:
slackpkg upgrade-all upgrades all installed packages
slackpkg install-new installs all packages that were added to the repo
slackpkg clean-system uninstalls all packages that were removed from the repo
And that’s all.
That reads easy but what’s with installing all packages that were added to a repo? How does that help anything?
That’s not really the point. The point this post is making is that third party software is often not available as a package for your distro. It’s been a minute since I used Slackware, but I doubt you can find neatly built tgz slackware packages of Steam or the Nvidia drivers.
I know Slackware has slackbuilds and you can install sbopkg to search for packages and automatically build them, but that goes a bit beyond “just use your package manager”.
Yeah for NVDIA you either wanna use a distro that bakes it in (Bazzite, PopOS) or hop over to tge command line and install the drivers there, e. g. Fedora:
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA
No idea how GUIs are for this nowadays (Manjaro, Linix Mint, Ubuntu, back when I used those distros it wasn’t working too well most of the time).
Arch-based distros do have the nvidia-dkms package available, works great in my experience. Linux Mint and Ubuntu got a dedicated driver utility for this. Debian provides a “nvidia-driver” package. OpenSuse provides it via YaST, or manually in a dedicated repo.
Does it work as good as having the driver pre-installed? Hell no, those nvidia drivers are gosh darn awful in nature. We can just hope NVK can completely replace them asap.
Until now I have used Ubuntu, Mint, both Opensuses, Arch, Endeavour, Fedora, Manjaro, and Gentoo
And not a single time did I have any problem installing any of these
Also, if youre new to linux and encounter a problem, you should first consult the forum of your Distro. Those people can actually help you find out the problem youre having and Open a bug report or expand the Wiki with your edgecase and the appropiate way to solve it. But going all Heuli Heuli on everyone instead of actually submitting bug reports is the most unproduktive and childish way to solve the problem you (and probably a few more people in the future and past) have had.
It is tho? Nvidia-dkms and steam
It’s just to install? The package manager fixed dependencies and all - if ya wanna complain then write what’s wrong…
Here’s what I learnt the hard way… if you’re having a problem, don’t go the hard way, it’s likely something extremely simple you missed, check the gui, restart your computer, at most reinstall some packages (either through gui or cli)
