The Nvidia driver in the Debian repos is virtually abandoned, though thankfully the Cuda repos hosted by Nvidia support Debian now, and give Debian users access to the latest drivers, like 610.
I enabled this repo last week on Debian 13 (RTX4080). While it technically works, I’d say it’s not without risks for those not a little familiar with linux.
It first required some fiddling cause the file that is supposed to blacklist Nouveau on boot was renamed by apt as .save or something as a result of the package upgrades, so the system just started loading Nouveau instead of the new driver. Fixing this got me further, as the 610 proprietary driver finally loaded.
Sarting my usual plasma X11 session didn’t work though. It launched but didn’t display shit (grey boxes instead of windows and taskbar basically).
Having also plasma wayland available from sddm, I tried to launch this session and it got me a working desktop. So I ended settling with this. Wayland used to be crap on my system, but with this recent NVIDIA drivers, it’s usable. My only real complaint is the extra latency on the mouse cursor.
I also had some difficulty getting it working on my rig, and I’m not a big fan if Debian’s documentation, as it often does assume knowledge, which makes it harder to follow along and feel confident you’re doing the correct steps.
Ultimately I switched my only Nvidia system to standard Linux Mint to have access to their easy to use Nvidia driver installer, which makes upgrading or downgrading the driver a 1-click process (though it requires a third party PPA done by a canonical employee to access the latest 610 drivers).
Except the NVIDIA drivers are 40 versions behind and break every time the kernel updates.
My hardware is about 43 versions behind, so… we good. Kinda. Waiting for that bubble to pop.
The Nvidia driver in the Debian repos is virtually abandoned, though thankfully the Cuda repos hosted by Nvidia support Debian now, and give Debian users access to the latest drivers, like 610.
I enabled this repo last week on Debian 13 (RTX4080). While it technically works, I’d say it’s not without risks for those not a little familiar with linux.
It first required some fiddling cause the file that is supposed to blacklist Nouveau on boot was renamed by apt as .save or something as a result of the package upgrades, so the system just started loading Nouveau instead of the new driver. Fixing this got me further, as the 610 proprietary driver finally loaded.
Sarting my usual plasma X11 session didn’t work though. It launched but didn’t display shit (grey boxes instead of windows and taskbar basically).
Having also plasma wayland available from sddm, I tried to launch this session and it got me a working desktop. So I ended settling with this. Wayland used to be crap on my system, but with this recent NVIDIA drivers, it’s usable. My only real complaint is the extra latency on the mouse cursor.
I also had some difficulty getting it working on my rig, and I’m not a big fan if Debian’s documentation, as it often does assume knowledge, which makes it harder to follow along and feel confident you’re doing the correct steps.
Ultimately I switched my only Nvidia system to standard Linux Mint to have access to their easy to use Nvidia driver installer, which makes upgrading or downgrading the driver a 1-click process (though it requires a third party PPA done by a canonical employee to access the latest 610 drivers).
Just wait until the kernel updates.
It’s perfect for my 8 year old laptop