nvidia-535 and Debian

demonsword@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 22 points –

Hello friends. I'd like to ask if any of you knows when/if Debian will finally include the nvidia-535 proprietary driver. It's kind of a pain in the ass to install it manually and keep it updated. Thanks!

11

NVIDIA's Debian repo for Cuda has more up to date GPU drivers, if you don't wanna manually install from the .run file. Documentation here, its not reflected yet in the docs but there's a Debian 12 repo.

thanks, I'm going to read that later and see if I can get it working

I think the easiest way is to take them from the 'experimental' branch of debian's own repository. But read about the consequences of enabling experimental, first.

Quoting the Debian FAQ:"project/experimental/: This directory contains packages and tools which are still being developed, and are still in the alpha testing stage. Users shouldn't be using packages from here, because they can be dangerous and harmful even for the most experienced people."

that's enough to scare me off

Yeah, you're right. If you absolutely need the latest NVidia drivers, you kind of have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. You can pull it from some random place on the internet, or use whatever script NVidia provides you with and do it under your own responsibility... Or use experimental, but it may be not be tested or be incompatible with your kernel version. Neither option is recommended. I've had some success with experimental. Debian have high standards and at least it's packaged and tied into the distribution at all. But there is no guarantee. (I'm not sure if you can mix that with the stable version of Debian, though. I use Debian Testing...) (Their Backports are a better option for Debian Stable.)

Maybe somebody else has an idea, I don't know any better way to do it. The proper way is to wait until it's tested and becomes available in Debian.

I don't know when that's going to happen. It usually takes quite some time with Debian. Probably some more months. You can have a look at the Package tracker

Backports use to get Nvidia updates, I don't know if this is the case anymore.

I'll be honest, if you use Linux, AMD is a must.

I never had huge problems with rolling release distros and Nvidia but recently got a AMD card and boi... Everything (hardware acceleration etc) basically worked out of the box with a very simple Arch installation... Never again going with Nvidia on Linux.

Yup. It also instantly supports even the most bizarre and unknown GPUs, like the BGA-only APU HD6310.