Making manjaro use nonfree drivers by default

[anon36603275]

I would definitely prefer to have the nonfree driver as default. It would have saved me some stress in the past.
Here is my experience so far:
On two of my Nvidia machines, when I tried to install Manjaro on it, I always needed multiple tries. This was because the system always locked up / frooze during installation. After some tries, sometimes the installation finished. But even then, when I booted up Manjaro, always after some seconds to minutes, the system did freeze.
At first as a Manjaro noob it took me a while to figure out why this happened. And it is hard to guess. I nearly gave up on Manjaro / (linux) because of this.

But someday I tried the nonfree option during Manjaro boot on my Nvidia systems. I did not really know what this did mean at that time, but I wanted to give it a try.
Since this day, I can finally have Manjaro working on my Nvidia machines, without constantly freezing and/or having graphics glitches in KDE.

My experience with the nouveau / free driver so far:

• system freezes
• graphics glitches
• unusable slow performance
• not working features (like nvenc and cuda)

So the Nvidia / nonfree driver seems to be the only one that really works on Nvidia hardware.
Also seems I’m not alone with this. The person who posted above me also had locking up issues + posts like this appear from time to time again, see this topic for example:

Kdenlive Version 20.08.1 crashes and freezes my desktop

Hello manjaro users: I’m brand new to Manjaro and would like to make it work in my live. I’m a video content creator and chose Kdenlive 20.08.1 as my video editor. There are times when I’m editing a video and the entire desktop freezes and the only way to get out of it is by pressing the reset button on my tower. Yes, I have tried CTRL+ALT+DEL; CTRL+SHIFT+ESC with no avail. I want to make it clear that this happens only when editing videos with kdenlive tool. More specific information, the issu…

So to me it seems common that the free driver often doesn’t work in an acceptable way.

As a noob it is really hard to guess that you are having such a horrible experience just because you did not choose the “nonfree” option in the boot screen.

So I would recommend setting the default driver to nonfree, to make Manjaro supporting more hardware setups ootb with less problems and so make it more easy and user friendly.

Edit: What I wrote is just my experience. I don’t think that noveau is complete trash, maybe someone has a better experience with it than I did, so the option to choose it should still be there.
Still I think that nonfree would be the better default for most users.