[hpcjoe]

I'm not sure of what issue you have with my statement. For me, it is a painless download + sh NVIDIA-....run. I have mostly newer GPUs, though the 3 systems (1 laptop and 2 desktops) with older GTX 750ti and GT 560m run the nouveau driver (as Nvidia dropped support for those).

Its a 13 year old laptop, and still running strong (linux though). Desktops are Sandy Bridge based. The RTX2060 and RTX3060 are doing fine with the current drivers. I usually only update when CUDA changes.

But yeah, its pretty simple. I can't speak to non-linux OSes generally, though my experiences with windows driver updates have always been fraught with danger.

My zen2 laptop has an inbuilt Renior iGPU, and I use it with the NVidia dGPU also built (GTX 1660ti). I leverage the Linux Mint OSes packaging system there for the GPU switcher. I run the AMD on the laptop panel and the NVidia on the external display. Outside of weirdness with kernel 5.13, I've not had any problems with this setup.

[salawat]

My point is, that "single download" or apt command to you is a royal pain in the ass to maintain, and makes things like kernel hacking a royal nightmare, all for Nvidia to play stupid out of tree games with the linux kernel maintainers. Easy "for a subset of users" does not excuse going out of the way to create more friction where none need exist.

But I'm glad your preferred workloads are unaffected. That counts for something I guess.