NVIDIA GeForce Now added official Linux support yesterday via Flatpak package! Here’s the step by step guide shows you how to manually install or remove it in Ubuntu and other Linux.

GeForce Now is NVIDIA’s cloud gaming service streams high-end PC games to laptops, phones, and TVs, allowing for better gaming experience without requiring high-end hardware.

The support for Linux (so far beta) requires Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Xorg for NVIDIA GPUs and Wayland for AMD/Intel GPUs. However, as the installer is an universal Flatpak package, it can be installed in most Linux Distributions!

Besides system requirement, it also requires dual-core Intel/AMD CPU, 4 GB memory, and a GPU with H.264 and H.265 (HEVC) video codecs support, as well as 580.126.07+ driver for NVIDIA GPUs and Mesa 24.2.8+ for Intel/AMD GPUs.

And, it requires 25 Mbps internet connection for 60 FPS gaming performance on 1920×1080 screen resolution, or 45 Mbps for 4K resolutions (3840×2160) at 120 FPS. See this page for more about the Linux OS requirements.

By default, you may download the installer from NVIDIA website. Then, add executable permission from file properties dialog, and finally click Run to start installing it.

While, below will show you how to add the remote repository and install the Flatpak package manually.

Install GeForce Now Flatpak Package

1. For Debian and Ubuntu based distributions, first open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to install Flatpak daemon:

sudo apt install flatpak

Other Linux may follow the official setup guide to enable Flatpak support.

2. Next, run command to add the GeForceNOW remote repository:

flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists GeForceNOW https://international.download.nvidia.com/GFNLinux/flatpak/geforcenow.flatpakrepo

In my case, I also need to add the Flathub repository for runtime dependencies:

flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

If you want to install GeForce Now for all users in your Linux Distribution, then skip --user in the both commands above.

3. After added the flatpak repositories, finally run the command below to install the package:

flatpak install --user GeForceNOW com.nvidia.geforcenow

Also, skip --user option if you added the repositories without it.

After installed the package, search for and install it from either start menu or Gnome overview depends on your desktop environment (Log out and back in if app icon is not visible).

And, run the command below regularly to check updates:

flatpak update com.nvidia.geforcenow

Uninstall GeForce Now

To uninstall the package, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data com.nvidia.geforcenow

Here, skip --delete-data if you want to keep the personal app data which is stored in .var/app/ directory.

Then, remove the remote repository by running command:

flatpak remote-delete GeForceNOW

Finally run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless run-times.

NVIDIA VA-API Driver, the VA-API implementation that uses NVDEC as backend, released new 0.0.15 version yesterday.

For those who don’t know about it, it’s a free open-source API for NVIDIA users to enable hardware accelerated video decoding support when using Firefox web browser.

As you may know, Firefox so for only supports VA-API for hardware accelerated video decoding on Linux. It’s supported by Intel and AMD GPUs, but NOT for NVIDIA with the proprietary driver. So, nvidia-vaapi-driver was born as a wrapper to do the job.

The driver has decoding support (NO encoding) for AV1, H.264, HEVC, VP8/VP9, MPEG-2, VC-1 video codecs. It’s designed for Firefox, though may also works in other apps, such as MPV, which is useful for testing purpose as Firefox needs to be tweaked for hardware decoding support.

The driver does not support Firefox sandboxing feature that isolates web content from the operating system. It by default detects if the sandbox enabled for RDD process that the decoder runs in, then choose whether to continue or not.

By releasing version 0.0.15, this sandbox check now only applies to Linux, so disabled for FreeBSD because it does not support Firefox sandboxing, and deprecated /proc (unmounted by default).

Besides skipping sandbox check in FreeBSD, the new version also improved VP8 codec support by fixed null slice headers, which may cause green corruption issue when decoding some VP8 video content with this driver.

How to Install NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.15

NVIDIA VA-API Driver has been made into many Linux distributions’ repositories. For Ubuntu since 24.04, it’s available in the universe repository though a bit old.

For the more recent 0.0.15, I’ve built it into this unofficial PPA for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, and Ubuntu 25.10 users.

To install it, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/nvidia-vaapi

sudo apt update

sudo apt install nvidia-vaapi-driver

For how to set up and make it work for Firefox, see either the official README or this step by step guide for Ubuntu.