Setting up proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers for Fedora Silverblue
Fedora includes the open source "nouveau" drivers out of the box which provide Nvidia graphics compatibility. Availability of the open source drivers are an amazing accomplishment. However, some users may want to take advantage of the performance improvements provided by the proprietary drivers.
Below are two sets of instructions that produce the same result: Command Line instructions and Graphical instructions.
Command Line Installation (6 steps)
These are the same steps from Alexander Larsson's original blog post, however, they are cleaned up for ease of use.
1) Update your system
$ sudo rpm-ostree update
2) Add the "free" and "nonfree" rpmfusion repositories. Replace "32" with the appropriate version of your Fedora Silverblue installation!
$ sudo rpm-ostree install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-32.noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-32.noarch.rpm
3) Reboot your system to enable the new repositories
$ systemctl reboot
4) Install the Drivers
$ rpm-ostree install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
5) Disable the nouveau driver
$ sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append=rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau --append=modprobe.blacklist=nouveau --append=nvidia-drm.modeset=1
6) Reboot your system to enable the new repositories
$ systemctl reboot
Done! You can verify the Nvidia graphics card is working as expecting by opening the newly installed "NVIDIA X Server Settings" app.
Graphical Installation
Note: This process is currently a work in process, and is not yet fully without the command line.
These are slightly modified instructions from a Fedora Magazine post.
1) Open Activities overview and open Software
2) If you are opening Software for the first time, you can dismiss the Welcome page and then select the "Enable" third party software option. If you do not see this option, you can skip this step; you will have another opportunity to enable third party repos in the following steps.
3) Open the Software Repositories menu
4) If you have not already, "Install" (enable) third party repos
5) Reboot your system
6) Log back into your system, open Software and open the Software Repositories menu again
Locate the "NVIDIA Driver" option and "Enable" it
7) Reboot your system
8) Log back into your system, connect to the internet, and open Software again. Find the "Categories" selection at the bottom of the Explore page and click:
Add-ons > Hardware Drivers > NVIDIA Linux Graphics Driver > Install.
Once installation is complete, reboot your system.
- Note: step 8 does not work as expected in Silverblue at this time. Alternatively, the use will need to enter these commands into the Terminal app:
8a) Install the Drivers
$ rpm-ostree install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
8b) Disable the nouveau driver
$ sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append=rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau --append=modprobe.blacklist=nouveau --append=nvidia-drm.modeset=1
8c) Reboot your system to enable the new repositories
$ systemctl reboot
Done! You can verify the Nvidia graphics card is working as expecting by opening the newly installed "NVIDIA X Server Settings" app.