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Comment by gh02t | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia's software platform for the whole Jetson series was, at least in my experience, absolutely awful on the Jetson Nano and Orin boards I worked on. Has that improved at all? I did not appreciate that the only option they provided was a full desktop version of ancient Ubuntu... and even flashing the OS image was a bizarre process.

Edit: looks like they at least have a better headless option now.

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Nowadays upstream Linux with UEFI mostly works, with their out of tree drivers. I’ve managed to make it work in NixOS with the stock kernel. Look at the open embedded L4T project, they have some recipes for building that. No need to use nvidia’s kernel anymore!

Also, supposedly on the second half of 2026 they were going to be moving even more stuff out of their Jetson-specific drivers as they already do for their slightly newer chips (so you could use the standard drivers, and standard CUDA builds). Let’s see how that turns out.

> with their out of tree drivers

rephrase please?

They’ve got external kernel modules that they use for some hardware that is not supported upstream, namely the GPU, but also some things like Ethernet I think. Everything else is upstream though, so the situation is similar to a regular NVIDIA GPU.

Who would’ve thought that NVIDIA started upstreaming stuff once they realized how much money Linux is making them?

ahhh, it's out-of-tree as in one word

I thought it was "out of three" or something

human parser error :/

Yeah, one of my bigger complaints especially on the Nano was the GPU only had really limited model support (iirc, mostly tflite but maybe I'm misremembering) and it sounds like the newer ones are more normal. That and what seems from the docs to be better headless support would be major improvements. Going further to mainline distro support would make them interesting to me again.

I was always disappointed by the Nano as it was a pretty capable device, but it seemed like not many people picked it up as a platform for cool things which I always attributed to the software.

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