I want to start a small discussion about potentially making Manjaro use the nonfree drivers (mainly nvidia) by default, but of course still configurable in grub. Distros like PopOS already do something similar, but they have their own ISO files instead. I already use this in my modified Manjaro KDE build.
I know this topic is controversial in the Linux community and I hope we can have a thorough discussion about that.
I’ll try to collect some pro/cons from the replies here:
Advantages:
- Proprietary drivers are NECESSARY for a lot of systems. A lot of systems will freeze/lock up without the blob drivers and in my experience, users do not know about the cause of this and blame it all on Linux or the distro.
- I don’t have to tell every single user to enable nonfree drivers when they install manjaro for gaming. I actually got so annoyed by this that I made my own manjaro spin just for that.
Disadvantages:
- Nonfree drivers are well, not free. (p.s.: f*ck nvidia)
- Nonfree on AMD hardware causes it to not boot. (Not true, no difference between free and nonfree)
I’ve already made the change and made a pull request:
(Copy paste from old forum post: Making manjaro use nonfree drivers by default - Manjaro Development - Manjaro Linux Forum)