I'm new to Linux and installed Linux Mint 22.3 alongside Windows 10. My system has a Ryzen 7 5700, 32 GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a Samsung 4K TV connected as the display. Mint worked normally at first, but after I installed the recommended Nvidia driver through Driver Manager and restarted, the display loses signal immediately after the Mint logo disappears. This happens with both boot options, so I currently can't reach the desktop. The boot menu also behaves strangely: one press of an arrow key sometimes moves the selection by two entries. The keyboard is now occasionally registering characters twice as well. I mainly want to use Linux for Steam and Epic games, emulators, video playback, game development with PyGame, Ren'Py, and Godot, plus video and image editing with Kdenlive, Blender, and GIMP. Is the Nvidia driver likely the problem, and what is the safest way to recover without reinstalling?
1 Answer
The recommended driver may be the problem. Try switching to the open Nvidia 580 driver, specifically nvidia-driver-580-open, since some of the newer recommended packages have stability issues. If you can reach a recovery environment or text console, remove or change the current driver there and then reboot. Mint should be suitable for your hardware and the gaming, development, and media-editing tasks you described; this sounds more like a driver issue than the wrong distribution.
How can I change the driver if I can’t get to the desktop? The keyboard is also lagging and sometimes enters every character twice, so even selecting an operating system in the boot menu is difficult.