Look long story short, what i expected to be a short install ended up being a 5 hour manhunt for an issue that resulted in needing a closed source instead of open source nvidia driver. Shes all switched to linux, and if her trial goes well and i don't end up tearing my hair out doing tech support. I may switch over as well, probably a different distro though.
One thing i will say though, even though the state of gaming has drastically improved since my first foray into linux, the "fine details" of gaming have not. Fuck me the first time i looked into the modding scene on linux and how much busywork that took, that just killed a little bit of my soul. Even trying to get her game open, we first had a xbox game controller bluetooth not connecting issue, my bandaid was to do a wired connection, and sitting here just now i hear a laugh and look back and see this in her game. What i can only imagine is some sort of video player error, but the game works. Its rough, but it works.
It'll be interesting to see how this goes, thats for sure
It's a weird cycle of "it's not an OS used by gamers so we don't have to support it" and "nobody supports it so I don't wanna use it."
And the part that sucks is that writing drivers for linux was probably trivial to these companies compared to windows but they just didn't wanna because it's unpopular.
My suspicion for Nvidia not opening their drivers is that they have something shifty going on, maybe benchmark "optimizations" or some other trickery.
That, and they're plain evil.
I think it was a Finnish philosopher who once said it best: Fuck you, Nvidia.
It's much simpler than that actually. Nvidia makes a lot of money in feature licensing, particularly GRID/vgpu. If they fully open-sourced the driver they would have no method of enforcing license restrictions.
Gotta love Finnish philosophy!