After upgrading to the latest version of Fedora a few months ago I was terribly un-impressed. The box in question had been upgraded every 6 months (-ish, thanks to Fedora 18) since Fedora 14 and I’d never had any issues, but then came Fedora 19.

To be fair it wasn’t Fedora’s fault per say, it was GNOME 3 and the open source nVidia graphics drivers. The desktop looked ok when you booted the box, but if you tried to use the Activities section, none of the transparency worked, and a lot of the Favourite icons in the dock had a luminous green behind them when you hovered over them.  What was worse was trying to launch a non-favourite application, click to do that and you could see the first 6 frequently used ones, but no others, and none under the “all” tab. This obviously made the whole experience pretty much unusable.

I went through the obvious investigations, straight away looking for some better nVidia graphics drivers.  I didn’t expect to find any official nvidia drivers after Linus’ hilarious rant last year. However, it turned out there was. I first tried downloading them from nVidia but their installers were less than helpful, and none wanted to install on my system regardless of fulfilling their dependencies. I then tried looking elsewhere and remembered the trusty basic linux guide site If !1 0. I found a guide on there for Fedora 18, and adapted it for Fedora 19, but unfortunately that wouldn’t work due to a mass amount of package conflicts.  I’d been meaning to wipe the system for a while and start again, so backed up the /etc/ folder to another drive, wiped the partitions, then installed Fedora 19 and used the guide again and all was fine and dandy.  The boot screen is the basic plymouth one rather than the more graphical splash one, but apart from that everything works and I don’t have awful un-usable graphics anymore.

If you want the latest guide, which is for Fedora 19, go here: http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2013/fedora-19-nvidia-guide/