Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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Last time I checked (three months ago?) you needed to patch the kernel to enable hibernation in kernel lockdown mode. I think OpenSUSE enabled these kernel patches by default, but that caused issues with secure boot.

Nvidia "just working" is a matter of luck and patience. I'm on kernel 6.7 on my laptop with the latest Nvidia driver and I'm booting with special Nvidia command line flags and running with carious Nvidia specific tweaks to make the thing not drain my battery the moment it boots up. Wayland support remains spotty on multiple compositors.

It'll probably Just Work with a whole bunch of extra power consumption on desktop, as it does on mine, assuming you don't particularly care about Wayland support. Wayland support works in that there is content rendered to the screen, but hardware acceleration is spotty and has weird performance issues that aren't present on Intel iGPUs.

You can make all of this work, but out of the box it doesn't.

Oh, OK, I didn't think about lockdown mode, just a regular rootfs encryption.

I still use X, as Wayland does not seem to implement all the features I'm using (but it's improving, so I expect I can go to Wayland in a few years).

Lockdown mode is a feature of Linux that's automatically enabled if it detects some circumstances. IIRC, it's a requirement for getting your stuff signed to allow you to do secure boot (without loading a manual secure boot key, of course). I would say it's enabled on most first-time Linux users' computers.

As for Wayland, I learned the hard way that modern distributions have removed the Wayland block on Nvidia drivers, and many will go Wayland-first after install. It's easy to switch back, but only if you know what X11 and Wayland even are in the first place. Of course distros have to try to push people to Wayland, because Red Hat and desktop environments are moving towards Wayland-only for new releases in a couple of years, but that's not without its unfortunate consequences.

In a few years, Wayland has gone from "doesn't even start" to "usable with a whole bunch of quirks and issues", I'm sure it'll work fine when the time comes to abandon X.org. But for now, the defaults are a bit weird. In practice, distros can pick between "some weird issues on Nvidia hardware" and "extremely limited touchpad gesture support" and it's tough to make a choice there.

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