How I Escaped Nvidia's Hell on Linux

It was the end of the weekend. I was on my PC, minding my business, when I suddenly decided to fix a minor color banding issue I’d been having on my external monitor. Simple, right?

So I thought: let’s try the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
Spoiler: bad idea.

Turns out, Nouveau (the open-source driver) gives me high refresh rates with slight banding.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA’s official driver?
A massive piece of ✨ corporate-grade garbage ✨ that doesn’t even recognize my monitor correctly while causing weird issues all over my device.

So I went back to Nouveau.
Or rather—I tried to.

What happened?

When I removed the proprietary drivers, Fedora also removed the nvidia-gpu-firmware package (without telling me). Without that, Nouveau couldn’t start. Kernel logs were filled with sad messages like:

firmware unavailable  
VPR locked, but no scrubber binary

For four hours, I tried everything:

• Reinstalling Nouveau

• Resetting Secure Boot and MOK

• Screaming internally

• Making proprietary ones work as a fallback

Then I reinstalled sudo dnf reinstall nvidia-gpu-firmware kernel-core

Rebooted. And everything worked again.

Moral of the story

If you ever have a problem with NVIDIA drivers: STAY WITH NOUVEAU.