Hi, I’m hijacking this thread to answer your other questions. Xpadneo is the correct answer, it will work with any desktop environment (xorg or Wayland) and all reasonable distros. It’s also the driver used by the steam deck, so go with that. But I suggest you read the troubleshooting section for two things: fixing input latency (if you experience it) and secure boot (more on that later).

I use both KDE and GNOME (on different computers, for different reasons), but in general I suggest you use KDE.

Now I will explain secure boot:

You can use third party drivers with secure boot on any distro that supports secure boot. Here’s how it works. Secure boot means that the bios checks that the kernel and requires that the kernel checks that all kernel drivers are signed with a key that it recognizes.

Now, either using a second bootloader (like redhat’s shim) signed by Microsoft, or either directly getting Microsoft’s signature, you get secure boot support on distros like Fedora or Ubuntu. So your kernel and all your included drivers are signed by Fedora with a key they got from Microsoft.

Other drivers (like Nvidia’s and this) aren’t signed, so secure boot will not accept those. But, secure but supports MOKs (machine owner keys), which are keys for signing drivers that you manage yourself and you installed on your bios, and secure boot will accept drivers signed with those.

Now, external drivers can be installed using two systems: akmod (used mostly by Fedora and redhat derivatives) and dkms (used by anyone else). These two are not in conflict and will work on the same system at the same time, it’s just preference. The Nvidia drivers you installed used akmod, xpadneo uses dkms.

Both these systems support setting up a key for signing, you should then register that key on your bios. When you installed your Nvidia drivers a little interface made by Fedora for those drivers helped you to set up your key for akmods, and now you can use any akmod driver with secure boot. You could always do it manually and you can do it on any distro, Fedora just adds the graphical interface.

To use xpadneo you need to do basically the same thing but for dkms, and you need to do it manually, it’s very easy, the troubleshooting section should direct you here for instructions, you will recognize some of the steps of registering the key.

If you feel a little adventurous, you can find which key akmod uses, and set dkms to use the same, so you don’t need to register another one.

Also, I strongly discourage this, but you can technically remove Microsoft’s key and sign everything with your own key if you really hate Microsoft. Please please please don’t do it, you will screw up and break your system badly, and it’s also a lot of work. Places like datacenters and such do this. Because they want total control on what goes on those machines. Also they don’t sign stuff on the machine themselves, but they sign on a more secure one and then deploy the signed stuff.

I prefer KDE since a started with Linux