Drivers

If you're using a computer your computer needs drivers for the OS to recognize your hardware. There's different kinds of drivers but the three most common and the ones we'll focus on for the purposes of this wiki are, graphics drivers, network drivers, and sound drivers.

Graphics Drivers:

Most distros will require you install these separately after initial setup. AMD lists their drivers as Mesa while Nvidia uses three sets of drivers that can be divided as follows:

1. Nvidia Proprietary: these were Nvidia's old in-house drivers but have since been discontinued. They offer a tangible benefit but only on gpu's with older architecture so check online to make sure that the card you're using isn't one of the one's that requires them.
2. Community Open-Source: if you're on an older Nvidia card you probably want to use these, they are not maintained by Nvidia but often had better performance and were more stable than Nvidia's old proprietary ones. The third entry on this list however, makes these pointless now for newer cards.
3. Nvidia Open-Source Official: with the release of newer Nvidia versions, Nvidia began to make open-source drivers themselves. They're made by them directly so they perform better and they comply with Linux community demands. Basically the standard now. Only use if your gpu is new enough.

Sound Drivers:

Linux by default used PulseAudio but this has been replaced by PipeWire. Most distros install this for you but in the event you're using something like Arch just search for it in your repo (short for repository, holds your system packages) or use the archinstall script to add to your initial installation.

Network Drivers:

Also comes with most distros by default. If you have a wifi card or buy a wifi adapter make sure you check to see that it's drivers are carried by the kernel (just search the serial number of the device model). If you they're not supported though, they may be available on Github for download (do not count on this).

NOTE: For Intel gpu drivers you'll want to see if Intel is still supporting and/or making them.