Why NVIDIA is so troublesome in Fedora? Ft Silverblue 33

Fedora traditionally had problems with NVIDIA drivers, and pretty much with every proprietary software too. In the last 3-4 years they have mostly solved them.. Or more correctly? They moved them to Silverblue. To be more precise, NVIDIA will work fine on Silverblue itself. But everyone’s using Silverblue will soon realize they spend more time on Toolbox rather on Host.

00:34 - And that’s something Fedora engineers know about, and that’s the plan! Use containers for everything! As a matter of fact, if we go to Toolbox Github and scroll a bit down on Readme, we will see that Terminal in Silverblue is planning to open Toolbox Shell by default! Actually? Even today and Silverblue 33, if we open a new Terminal tab while on Toolbox, the new session will automatically open the container. And it’s a pretty good idea really! But another thing Fedora engineers know very well, is that their users make a heavy use of NVIDIA drivers. In my case, I’m using TensorFlow for Anime Voice Studio development, which was the original reason I tried to install CUDA on Toolbox. Those are on the same situation like me, it is certain that they have come across to this bug. And notice is labeled as help wanted. For those who don’t belong to the circle, I’ll keep it very short.

01:30 - So there are three ways to get NVIDIA on Toolbox. First we can install NVIDIA drivers both on Host and Toolbox, and after some hacking we may be lucky to make it work. Our second option is to use the NVIDIA container runtime, which is also the official recommendation from Red Hat. Only there are two problems. First the library isn’t even available for Fedora, and second there is an open bug for rootless containers like Toolbox. The third option which isn’t really a choice yet, and I guess that’s why this issue is tagged as help wanted, is to leak the Host drivers and the container bind mount the location.

02:07 - So in theory NVIDIA will work out of box, kinda similar with what Flatpak does. And perhaps I haven’t fixed it my self yet, but as long as it is possible I will make it work no matter what! And perhaps I should have been pissed with Silverblue way, but actually it’s quite the opposite! So for once again I will strongly suggest to new Linux users to go with it, simply because it is better to dive into containers since day one. People who hate Silverblue way, are basically old Linux users that it is hard to adapt on next technology. But the truth is, containers started from servers, they totally exploded on embedded, and now they came to desktop, and they came to stay. So you better learn to live with them, and you won’t have noob issues like mine! But to come to original video question, here’s why I believe Fedora makes NVIDIA and friends so troublesome, when in reality they can fix all the stupid issues in a day! So, Fedora community isn’t just developers and Linux enthusiasts.

03:06 - Above everything they are natural open source geeks! And the original geeks not only don’t care to support proprietary stuff, but they will leave you to suffer and burn till you get so pissed, that you will become a true geek your self! Will I become a Goli? A true geek Loli?.