I've recently made the switch from Windows to Linux Mint mainly to escape the invasive data collection practices of Microsoft. I'm really enjoying the experience overall, especially for media consumption and browsing. However, I have a gaming laptop that has an NVIDIA dGPU, and I'm faced with the choice between open-source and proprietary drivers. From my understanding, the open-source drivers may have worse performance, but my research is a bit dated. I'm curious about the current performance comparison and whether there are any privacy concerns regarding NVIDIA's closed-source drivers. How invasive is the data collection? Thanks for your help!
5 Answers
Aside from basic performance monitoring, I wouldn’t worry much about targeted advertising from these drivers. They’re pretty straightforward in their operations.
Typically, there isn't evidence suggesting that drivers, including NVIDIA's, collect personal data. NVIDIA primarily focuses on hardware compatibility rather than advertising. However, since it's closed-source, we can’t be 100% sure about what happens under the hood.
The open-source drivers aren't really meant for gaming. They'll let you use the hardware, but that’s about it. If you want better gaming performance, you’ll need the proprietary ones—unless you're using NVIDIA's open drivers, which are said to be comparable to the proprietary versions now for newer GPUs.
It’s important to distinguish between the Nouveau drivers, which aren’t great for gaming, and the NVIDIA open drivers, which have improved significantly.
Yes, performance-wise the proprietary drivers are still superior. There aren't significant privacy issues tied to the drivers themselves, as they're mainly communicating how to operate the hardware with the OS. If you're seriously into privacy, check out secureblue.dev for tips!
When it comes to privacy, drivers generally don’t pull data unless specifically designed to do so. Installing third-party software to tweak driver settings might introduce some risks, but NVIDIA itself hasn’t seemed to target Linux users with invasive practices like that. From what I can tell, they don’t see any benefit in collecting data on non-gaming platforms.
While it’s rare for a driver to transmit data, technically they can access hardware directly. A driver could theoretically read pixel data, but encoding and sending that can be quite complex. The current design limits the likelihood of this being a serious concern.
I've read that the Windows NVIDIA driver does contain some telemetry, and their GeForce Now app seems to track a lot more. It’s always good to be cautious!