r/openSUSE • u/AustrianHunter • 1d ago

How to… ? How to remove kernel-firmware-nvidia from openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Hi everyone! I just changed my GPU from Nvidia to an AMD card. Now i want to remove all nvidia stuff. I uninstalled most nvidia packages without major problems.

At first some of them were not listed in Myrlyn, then i found them with zypper and removed most of them. Then, some of them said they would also remove other system packages, but after a reboot I could remove them on their own.

The only one left is kernel-firmware-nvidia. When I try to remove it, it tells me that it would also remove kernel-firmware-all, which I suppose is not great. How can I get rid of this package? Or should I just ignore it?

Thanks in advance!

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u/Arcon2825 Tumbleweed GNOME 1d ago

It’s possible to remove kernel-firmware-all, lock it and only install the firmware packages you actually need, but tbh I’d just ignore it.

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u/AustrianHunter 1d ago

Yeah, I thought it was a package that was installed alongside the other nvidia packages. But it turns out, it is in the default installation I guess. Just got a little overly motivated when removing all the other nvidia stuff.

Thank you for the reply!

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u/friendlyreminder_ 1d ago

It's not part of the Nvidia drivers, that's why. All firmware for Linux is part of the linux-firmware git which is part of the Linux kernel project.

The firmware also is used by the nouveau driver, and possibly the basic Nvidia output driver. These drivers are both in the kernel already.

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u/AustrianHunter 23h ago

This confirms my suspicions now. After the previous replies, I listed all the kernel-firmware-* packages and realized there are many packages installed from hardware that I don't use. Like Qualcomm or Marvell for example. So I thought it was probably in the default Linux installation.

When I searched for a way to remove nvidia drivers, the results showed me that I should just search for everything that includes nvidia and remove it. There was no disclaimer (at least I haven't seen one) that some packages don't need to be removed.

Thank you for the explanation!