Why negativo17 over RPM Fusion

RPM Fusion’s NVIDIA packages work, but negativo17’s repo tends to track driver releases faster and packages them with fewer of the DKMS-related headaches that show up after a kernel update. For a desktop where I don’t want to babysit whether the driver rebuilt correctly after every dnf upgrade, that reliability matters more than which repo is more “official.”

Adding the repos

Two separate repos … one for the driver itself, one for the multimedia codec stack that pairs with it:

sudo dnf5 config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=https://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-nvidia.repo
sudo dnf5 config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=https://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-multimedia.repo
sudo dnf5 makecache

Installing the actual driver stack

sudo dnf5 install -y \
    nvidia-driver \
    nvidia-driver-cuda \
    nvidia-driver-cuda-libs \
    nvidia-settings \
    nvidia-driver-libs.i686

The .i686 package matters if you run anything 32-bit … Steam, older games, some proprietary software … that expects 32-bit NVIDIA libraries to actually be present, not just the 64-bit driver.

Rebuilding initramfs before rebooting

This step gets skipped by people copying half a guide, and then they wonder why the driver “doesn’t load”:

sudo dracut --force
sudo reboot

The kernel needs the NVIDIA modules baked into initramfs to load them at the right point in boot … installing the package alone isn’t enough if initramfs hasn’t been regenerated to include it.

Confirming it actually worked

nvidia-smi

Should show your card, driver version, and current utilisation … not an error about no devices found.

rpm -qa | grep nvidia-driver

Confirms the actual installed package versions.

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

Should say wayland if you’re running Plasma on Wayland … worth checking specifically after an NVIDIA driver install, since NVIDIA’s Wayland support has historically been the rougher edge compared to X11, and a session silently falling back to X11 after a driver change is a real thing that happens.

ls /etc/yum.repos.d/ | grep -i nvidia

Confirms the repo itself actually registered correctly, useful if dnf ever complains it can’t find the driver packages on a later upgrade.

The actual result

Driver installed, boots clean, nvidia-smi reports correctly, Wayland session confirmed still active rather than silently downgrading to X11. No DKMS rebuild drama on the next kernel update, which was the whole point of picking negativo17 over the alternative in the first place.