There are 3 Nvidia Wiki pages for NixOS

[LinuxIsBest]

Revised code

 #  ========================================
 #  🖼️ NVIDIA GPU Support
 #  ========================================

 #  NVIDIA drivers are proprietary, but NixOS makes them easy to install.
 #  These are required for hardware acceleration and optimal performance.

 #  🔍 Tip: Not sure which NVIDIA driver version you need? Some cards require legacy drivers.
 #         You can find detailed, card-specific info on the NixOS Wiki:
 #         https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/NVIDIA
 #
 #         The basic setup below enables the current NVIDIA drivers and provides a GUI settings panel.

 #  💡    If you're using an NVIDIA GPU, uncomment this block and comment out the AMD/Intel one above.

 #  ✅ Basic setup — uncomment to enable NVIDIA drivers
 #         hardware.nvidia.enable = true;
 #         hardware.nvidia.nvidiaSettings = true;

 #  💡 Requirement: Nvidia Open Source Driver.
 #     If in doubt check the Wiki https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/NVIDIA
 
 #     Newer cards may need this to be true:
 #          hardware.nvidia.open = true;   # Newer GPU
 
 #     Older cards need that to be false:
 #          hardware.nvidia.open = false;  # Older GPU

 #  ✅ Optional: Enable 32-bit libraries (needed for older apps and games)
 #         hardware.graphics.enable32Bit = true;

 #  ✅ Optional: Enable NVIDIA's built-in modesetting
 #  ⚠️  Do NOT enable this if you're using an Optimus (hybrid graphics) system
 #         hardware.nvidia.modesetting.enable = true;

[LinuxIsBest]

Good question. I do not recall anymore, and it may have only applied to older hardware.

As I said, in my OP, between having so many sources of information, while also not having an NVIDIA, I take much of what I read on faith that people who have those cards would know what they’re talking about.

I’ve kept it as a precaution if anything else at this point. My goal, after all, is only to provide a generic (basic) configuration. And I link to the now new official Wiki (twice) for anyone who needs or expects more than that.

[sshine]

@waffle8946

#1 is basically dead, don’t use it.

Not really… both wikis exist, have frequent contributions, and compete for pagerank, with the unofficial one often having the highest because it existed for longer.

[LinuxIsBest]

You have no idea how true that is. lol

My default search engine is Qwant.com located in France, Europe. And when searching for NixOS I get both Wiki’s plus the Manual, which some here claims is not counted as Wiki (If not Wiki, why Wiki shaped? lol ).

[waffle8946]

It’s still dead, don’t use it. The owner of the site doesn’t maintain it anymore. It’s just highly ranked because people keep linking to it lol, and contributions are from those who don’t know better (and I wouldn’t rely on their info tbh anyway).

[TLATER]

@LinuxIsBest

(If not Wiki, why Wiki shaped? lol ).

The difference between a wiki and a manual/documentation is the contribution model. Wikis have low barriers to contribution, basically anyone can change anything with little oversight.

Manuals/official documentation is written with the same contribution requirements as the code, so in theory it’s much higher quality, but also takes more time to write. This means that a wiki usually expands on documentation, slightly unreliably, but it can adjust quicker to temporary issues, document bugs, etc., while manual contributors will usually prioritize just fixing the issues over documenting them.

In the case of the NixOS manual this is mostly alright, but it’s focused more on development than desktop use, so as a desktop user the wiki is usually more helpful.

As for unofficial vs official wiki, the unofficial one is unmaintained as @waffle8946 says, and any attempts at contacting the person who owns the domain have been unsuccessful. Use at your own peril, it’ll almost certainly become a cryptominer eventually.

Most helpful is of course always reading the source code, but yeah, not everyone can - or should have to - do that.

[sshine]

@waffle8946

It’s still dead, don’t use it. The owner of the site doesn’t maintain it anymore. It’s just highly ranked because people keep linking to it lol, and contributions are from those who don’t know better (and I wouldn’t rely on their info tbh anyway).

@TLATER

As for unofficial vs official wiki, the unofficial one is unmaintained as @waffle8946 says, and any attempts at contacting the person who owns the domain have been unsuccessful. Use at your own peril, it’ll almost certainly become a cryptominer eventually.

Since these are not true, and they keep getting repeated, I will relay the real state of the unofficial wiki: It is being maintained by @fadenb who has replied my emails in the recent past. It has a non-empty admin team of undisclosed participants, and it has editors (I contribute to both wikis). But the unofficial wiki does not have a wiki team, like the official wiki has, and it sees about 20-30% the edits of the official wiki last time I checked the stats. Most of the articles are exactly the same from when the official wiki copied them ~14 months ago.

So… relying on wiki content: That’s highly dubious either way; there’s a slightly higher chance the unofficial wiki’s content is a bit more outdated, but also a higher chance it wasn’t link-jacked because it has rather good anti-spam protection, since it was defaced by the official wiki’s founders early last year.

We can certainly discuss if the state of the two wikis turned out ideal, and if it could have been handled better. But we cannot deny the fact that there are two actively maintained wikis run by two teams with competing pagerank, and the only people who suffer are newcomers. Let’s not increase the misinformation to “help” people.

[waffle8946]

What’s misinformation is claiming that nixos.wiki is remotely maintained when things like For Beginners - NixOS Wiki still exist after 5 years despite the entire page being useless. The only “maintenance” the old wiki did is revert vandalism mentioning the official wiki and region-blocking a large portion of users based on IP address (who then complained here and we redirected them to the official wiki).

The counterpart page on the official wiki was deleted months ago because they are actually trying to curate content. The official wiki might be bad in some ways too, but it’s the most-likely to be up-to-date compared to the dead wiki and the NixOS manual.

EDIT:

@sshine

it was defaced by the official wiki’s founders early last year

Now that’s factually wrong, it was vandalized by a random member of the community who thought they were being helpful despite being told repeatedly to not do that.

@sshine

the unofficial wiki does not have a wiki team

This was discussed many times, and as I understood: the unofficial wiki was offered help and rejected it. The sad state was noticeable even prior to the official wiki’s creation and is in fact the reason for its creation. If the unofficial wiki will neither accept maintenance help nor help themselves then it will simply go downhill as it has continued to do.

Counting edit statistics are IMO pointless when most of those edits are from those who are new to Linux and NixOS and likely not equipped to be giving solid advice anyway (that goes for both wikis) - but if there are experienced community members fixing the inaccurate content then there is some hope (and it’s qualitatively clear that the official wiki is seeing more from those users).

And btw, blocking entire countries, some of which are well-represented in our community, is not preventing click-jacking, it’s just racism.

[Brisingr05]

The unofficial wiki also seems to block some VPNs. I’ve tried multiple servers of multiple countries with Mullvad VPN, which I use on a daily basis, and I’m almost always greeted with this message:

Your ISP (and/or VPN provider) has been banned from nixos.wiki due to ongoing attacks originating from their IP space.

To regain access to the wiki, you can:

• Use another internet service provider.
• Contact your ISP and urge them to take action that will result in a stop of the attacks.

There’s also at least one (IMO) questionable page (something about “wokeism” in NixOS), which is definitely not something I’d expect to see in such a wiki.

[LinuxIsBest]

Speaking as the OP, who actually found 3 Wikis, and still could not find a basic, generic option to include drivers - I would say they all could use some work.

I tested the build of my configuration - It works. No errors. Whether is displays on Nvidia, I guess I will find out when more than one person uses it (I don’t have a Nvidia card).

Let me explain how I Wiki should be helpful. 1st the basics. Do “random” to accomplish the bare minimum., followed by do “random” to accomplish a more detailed setup. You all seem to be great at that detailed setup, but all I wanted was the bare minimum. - I have accomplished that.

Now, having said that, can we not hijack the thread over who’s Wiki is better or not. That would be great. Thanks.

[badcold]

@TLATER

Steam has lots of interaction with the host outside of simple game launching features. Various big picture mode features will not work and steam controller configuration doesn’t connect properly with the flatpak version. I think that’s the detail that made me finally switch to the NixOS version.

I’ve seen a similar issue under Pop!_OS where the flatpak version of steam could not recognize a gaming steering wheel. Switching to the native package worked like a charm.

[TLATER]

@LinuxIsBest

Speaking as the OP, who actually found 3 Wikis, and still could not find a basic, generic option to include drivers

I still think sadly the reality is that there is no simple, generic option. Third party kernel modules are always a PITA, if you buy NVIDIA hardware and try to use Linux that’s just the experience you get. It’s a consequence of the very anti-open source practices of this hardware vendor, and in fact their poor driver support, NixOS can’t do much about that.

The experience tends to be pretty poor on other distros too, FWIW, many don’t even distribute the official NVIDIA driver.

It has been improving as of late, so we’re getting close, but I think we’re still a few years off a good out-of-the-box NVIDIA experience.

For a truly simple experience, at the moment I would not recommend configuring the NVIDIA driver at all, just use nouveau. It may not have the best performance tuning, so if all you care about is gaming that’s an issue, and of course this lacks CUDA, but at least the driver lets you boot into a desktop reliably.

@LinuxIsBest

You all seem to be great at that detailed setup, but all I wanted was the bare minimum. - I have accomplished that.

That’s kind of my point. The “bare minimum” is… complicated, because what you’re trying to condense into a simple, single, authoritative “what to do” just isn’t that simple. This driver sucks.

Your setup still contains a few superfluous things and small factual inaccuracies which I’m certain will be cargo culted if it picks up. The NVIDIA driver config is super prone to cargo culting; I think it’s simply the less experienced section of the community that’s more likely to try gaming, or I suppose AI programming. People will attempt disabling modesetting because of your comment, and should the upstream module ever change its logic to not sidestep that option this will result in folks with broken setups. LLMs just amplify this cargo culting effect these days (and Imma be honest, it looks like your comment was hallucinated by an LLM, afaict the exact opposite is the case).

It’s not that I don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve here, I’m just telling you that you’re completely overlooking that the nuance is actually important. Even with the “simple” config, you’re only supporting a subset of the last 4 years of NVIDIA GPUs. For the majority of users ignoring iGPUs will result in a poor experience, most folks are on laptops IME.

I’ve been trying to help out with NVIDIA config here for years, and attempted this very thing many times now. A one-size-fits-all, “simple” solution is just very hard here. Look around; barely a day passes without someone with an NVIDIA config question, and they all come in with pretty correct-looking configuration.

It’s not like we aren’t self-aware, hell, I can’t find it anymore, but there was a cute lil’ april fools joke with a “support request” thing where “I tried using NVIDIA on NixOS” was one of the listed options. I still giggle at that thinking back.

[LinuxIsBest]

Agree to disagree, since I have accomplished my goal, and anything beyond that I have no interest.

I will be unsubscribing from this thread. Cheers, everyone.

[LinuxIsBest]

SOLUTION There are 3 Nvidia Wiki pages for NixOS - #21 by LinuxIsBest

Op has unsubscribed. Best of luck.