this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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You say you haven't been able to install Nvidia drivers, but then say you are using 550 drivers. Are you saying you can't run any games or programs that engage your GPU? Open and terminal and run
nvidia-smiand see what the output is.What is the filesystem on these drives? If it's NTFS, they will be mounted as read-only by default and show as owned by root. This is by design to prevent potential damage to NTFS filesystems which are technically a Windows-only thing. You do have the option of changing this behavior, but it will inevitably cause problems because the open driver to run these filesystems on Linux still runs into some MS proprietary filesystem issues. If you have the option of copying the files on each drive to your local drive, reformatting the externals into another more friendly filesystem, then copying the files back, you'll be in a much better place. I would suggest exFat to make things simplest for you, since it sounds like you may be plugging those drivers into other Windows machines, potentially.
I'm pretty sure you've got a race condition with the Nouveau driver getting loaded first then. That's the open source Nvidia driver in the stock kernels. Run
lsmod | grep nouveauto confirm (if you get lines returned, then it's loaded.You can sidestep this by blacklisting it and giving the installed Nvidia driver a chance to load first. Instructions here (use the Ubuntu section)
Reboot, and then you should be good to go. If
nvidia-smistill doesn't show the correct output, you may need to just reinstall the driver packages again.Seems like a promising answer, I wonder why someone downvoted it. I wish they'd left a comment.
I'll def explore it
Well that's exactly what the issue is, so there's your solution. Easy to confirm with one command.
Sometimes, the simplest option is to try a different distribution instead of messing with individual things that aren't working on one. A lot of distributions come with the Nvidia drivers set up by default, such as POP OS. You could also try a fresh install of mint and install the Nvidia drivers using the driver manager application, and see if you're getting the same results. As far as NTFS, that does have to change. You will keep running into problems if you don't format them into something like ext4. When I first installed Linux, I had all my games on an NTFS drive and very few of them would work at all.
Shoot. I got a lot of stuff on that drive.
I thought about pop OS but I don't like that it's owned by some corporation or something. And I thought about Manjaro but it's Arch Linux and I don't even want to open that can of worms. I'm having enough trouble in debian, with tons of tutorials and help.
I have used the software manager to install the drivers (didn't work and the computer froze at login) but it was after a Timeshift not a fresh install. I'd hate to do that now just to find it still didn't work.
That's very fair. I say this only because I've found myself going down a rabbit hole of things not working on my own before, and a reinstall is usually the faster option for me. POP was just one example, a lot of distributions come with Nvidia installed by default. Mint should work pretty much out of the box, but I remember Optimus being tricky sometimes. I do not recommend Manjaro, and not because it's arch. The last time I used Manjaro, it's automatic updater updated my Nvidia driver and my kernel to two separate versions that didn't work with each other, and bricked my system on me. It's not exceptionally stable even as far as Arch goes. Arch doesn't have to be scary, I use Garuda and it has made it very user friendly. I run all updates with one command and that command automatically makes snapper backups that I can pick between on boot, which makes fixing anything that can go wrong pretty easy. Garuda Cinnamon edition uses the same desktop that mint uses. Anyway, I do hope you're able to get mint working for you.
Pop OS is excellent. You wouldn't really know it's created by a corporation. It's basically just the build they run on their hardware but I've not seen anything in it like ads or anything limiting my freedom. My perception of it is that it's just a more friendly and (snap-free) Ubuntu and I concur with those saying Nvidia is smoother on it. It does have a modified gnome but coming in the near future is their own DE called cosmic which seems promising. If it ends up being bad I will probably just switch to fedora even though Debian based distros are more supported. Been loving fedora on my new laptop