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3 hours ago
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The Good
For the 7700 XT and the B580, no further steps were necessary as the open source drivers are already baked into the kernel that ships with Ubuntu 24.04. The kernel used for the tests on Ubuntu 24.04 was Linux 6.11.0.25-generic. Note that you can quickly check your kernel version using the uname -r terminal command. The 4060 Ti required just a smidge more tinkering and I had to pick the nvidia-driver-570 proprietary driver from the Ubuntu's Additional Drivers application. After a quick restart of the PC, everything just worked on both the 7700 XT and the 4060 Ti (more on the B580 later). This was quite the relief given the horror stories you hear around the digital campfire about NVIDIA drivers on Linux. It was nice to see that things have moved in the right direction.
The Bad
Setting up the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti was closer to one of those aforementioned horror stories. At the time of writing, the NVIDIA 5060 Ti has only been out for about two months. As such, its drivers weren’t yet shipped with Ubuntu 24.04. This meant that to get the 5060 Ti working on Ubuntu 24.04, I needed to install the drivers from NVIDIA’s website. This is not a recommended step for the Noob as it can cause conflicts with your distro’s NVIDIA packages.
Thanks to NVIDIA’s recent attitude shift towards Linux, the open source drivers on NVIDIA’s website did support the 5060 Ti and I was able to get the system up and running. The installation did require running a Bash script, but was fairly painless since the script launched a guided installation process within the terminal that could be navigated with the arrow keys. This script does flash a few warnings during the installation process that could easily discourage a Noob, especially when it starts talking about cryptic sounding words like Xorg. Hopefully NVIDIA will one day follow AMD and Intel’s lead and ship their drivers with the Linux kernel, alas that day is not here yet and Nvidia’s Linux drivers continue to feel like an afterthought.
The Ugly
As for the 9070, unfortunately it wasn't supported by the kernel that shipped with Ubuntu 24.04. Having only been released on March 6, 2025 this result wasn’t entirely surprising as open source drivers can take some time to mature.
I don’t expect the average Linux Noob to want to change the kernel on their operating system, but I wanted to try installing AMD’s proprietary drivers from their website and a newer kernel was a prerequisite. This initially seemed like it had solved my problem, and the GPU was recognized as “AMD Radeon™ Graphics” by the operating system. This is unfortunately where my luck ended as attempting to launch games resulted in a host of different Vulkan errors. For example, here's the error I got when attempting to launch Strange Brigade on the 9070:
