Today, I’m proud to announce that NVK, the open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa, is now ready for prime time.

With the release of Mesa 24.1, NVK can now be used to have a usable desktop experience on machines using Nvidia’s latest hardware, forgoing the need to use the proprietary drivers entirely.

This is huge news as it means that distributions like Fedora and Debian which exclude the nonfree drivers by default will now be supported out-of-the-box on more hardware with negligible performance differences compared to the proprietary drivers and minus the headaches involved with setting them up.

This should be expected on Fedora 41 + Ubuntu 24.10 (come this Fall) and Debian 13 (come next year) and should appear in rolling release distributions in spring (come April/May).