The only point I was trying to make (as long as i understood the thread correctly) was the nouveau drivers don’t always work
That user had already installed the automatic nonfree and was experiencing freezes,etc from the provided proprietary 440 nvidia driver.
The ‘guess’ solution in that thread so far is that maybe 450 will help.
But since it isnt included int he ISO … it idnt available.
So the better scenario might be nouveau actually … but is probably ultimately architect.
So no … its still not really applicable.
Not to mention that every time the Kernel gets updated, the drivers need to be reinstalled as well.
No thanks. Real PITA in the Old Days when users had to do this.
Actually if you read a bit closer you will notice this bit:
It would seem the nouveau driver did not work well with his particular graphics-card. Well i think we all can agree on blaming Nvidia for this situation though, right?
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Yes, the working one. He couldn’t really get into a working live system before, as noted by the original post.
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Ah I see now … there it is.
The problem is using that hardware to start with.
Nouveau is known to have issues with many Nvidia cards, sometimes rendering system “unrebootable” (hard lockup). Another common issue is not booting at all. So the default option in grub should be non-free, I believe. With it, there’s a higher chance for live system to boot and work properly when user’s machine is equipped with Nvidia card.
As a person who is used to deal with lots of manual kernel options like nouveau.noaccel=1 and so on just to boot many other distros normally, I can’t help but agree with @TotallyNotElite on this proposal.
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why not rename option ?
Free Drivers or Nvidia Drivers ?
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I never would have guessed that we would see the day where ‘non-free’ is more confusing than ‘proprietary’ … but if anything thats the category rename I would make.
Open vs Proprietary
(sprinkles 2 drops of wibubu blood to summon the dark collaborator Stallman)
Really the ‘free’ is a misnomer anyways.
The drivers from intel are ‘open’ but they arent free as in ‘freedom’.
And if we mean ‘free to install’ … then they all are, including nvidia.
Free and Opensource are not the same thing.
Nunchucks.
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Yeah, these options’ titles should be something like “Nvidia proprietary driver on” and “no Nvidia proprietary driver off” or similar.
My vote goes too to the automatic selection of nonfree drivers if the installer finds them as a good match for the graphics card.
Also, my recent experience tells me that non-proprietary drivers (that is, the “free” ones) work like crap on a discrete GPU. I Tried them for the first time just yesterday on a laptop with a NVIDIA 2070 Refresh Max-Q; Results?
- Free drivers:
System bootable but horrible performances (just dragging a window around was spiking my CPU workload by 30-40%, all taken up by X-org/Kwin) - Nonfree drivers
All good and dandy
Also, we should maybe add another variable to this discussion: the Kernel. might that be another element to consider? In my case, I wasn’t actually able to even boot into the installer with the non-free dirvers so I had to install Manjaro with them; But after installation and after updating my system and using the latest Kernel (5.8) I was then able to switch to the non-free one without any issue.
So this might be something to consider when referring to people unable to boot their system when using “non-free” drivers (the problem there could well involve the Kernel version the installer is using)
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Somehow this topic escaped me.
A few things i want to add from my part:
- mhwd ui and cli needs a rework - is old; it can’t escape the fact that there are more laptops and desktops with exotic GPU combinations available out there and people want Manjaro installed on.
- simplifying the install process is a must and the automatization of the best drivers choice needs to be done; since there are so many custom systems out there, and each user managed to get them working, those solutions could be gathered together and used somehow.
- FOSS is a nice idea, i truly love it and respect it, but we live in the age when people install: Discord, Spotify, Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, Zoom, Steam and other applications that rely on performance.
I think is easy to see where i go with this. 
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I personally disagree. Managing exotic hardware configurations is Xorg’s and the kernels job. It’s our job to provide the required packages.
How many times is it actually necessary to manually modify the default configurations?
That’s fine, you can do that, but let me remind you that you can’t boot kernel 5.9 for example as this moment has no modules for Nvidia build, if you have 450xx drivers installed and the nvidia.conf active. So, there are connections there that need addressed.
I use my own, always, but some do experiments or lost the old ones.
First example:
Second example:
Other have laptops and use docks or try to connect more displays separate, many crash.
Since now you are part of the contributors group, check my topic regarding MHWD so you understand my point the same way i understand your point. I’m on your side! 
You make very good points and then i notice a tendency from you to use the elbows 
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So I’m guessing this isn’t getting implemented? Unfortunate because I still get multiple users every week that don’t understand that they need to set the driver option to “nonfree” to get a stable system.
I’ve also found this Reddit post about an hour ago:
Stuff like this doesn’t need to happen. All you need to do to fix these issues forever is to change 1 line of code.
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What if there was a script that detected which card the user had and told the user which driver was recommended, why and what the alternative was. Instead of ‘free’ or ‘non-free’ which in English by the way has more then one meaning. Many users will see that and think it is about money. How many windows users are going to understand that it refers to freedom to change the code. Proprietary vs Open-Source is more accurate language. People paid for the use of the Proprietary drivers when they bought the card. It is the companies responsibility to issue drivers that make the card work.
AMD cards would be recommended to use Open-Source, newer Nvidia cards would be recommended proprietary and older Nvidia cards would be recommended to use Open Source because I believe the older drivers that run those cards are not supported in the newer Kernals.
As for the explanations it could say something like
GTX 2070 detected select driver [ Nvidia 455 (Recommended) ]
Nvidia Proprietary driver recommended for performance; If wish to use non-Nvidia driver please select 'Open Source'.
Would that not help new to linux users?
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… I doubt that would fix it forever.
Even if we gained a no-frills elitist attitude, and dropped the hype about ‘user-friendliness’, made everyone take a 2-week course before posting on the forums, etc, etc … there would still be posts like that.
And here I give you the top 2 comments from that ‘eye opening’ thread…
Manjaro has mhwd which auto installs proprietary drivers. Use it.
Installer? Man no wonder you’re having a bad time if you’re going to nvidia’s website and running the installer from there.
…So yeah. They used it incorrectly … it misbehaved. shocking.
I still see no reasonable argument for this.
And oh … the wonderful backlash from the rest of the linux world when manjaro defaults to forcing only proprietary drivers. That would be a good look too.
Look … some people refuse to understand their system before making changes or throwing a fit and blaming something besides themselves. It happens.
Some people want to delete the running kernel, or remove package X and all dependencies without looking, etc, etc. It will happen … and it doesnt mean that uninstalling things should become impossible (or obfuscated).
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