Old NVIDIA drivers

Posted Jul 24, 2025 6:57 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
Parent article: Prokop: What to expect from Debian/trixie

My biggest disappointment with Trixie is going to be the old NVIDIA drivers it is going to ship with. It looked like they were going to ship release 535 so it did get better. Right now, it looks like Trixie will ship with NVIDIA drivers release 550.

The issue is that explicit sync was added with driver release 555. Explicit sync is a really big deal, especially for Wayland support.

The 550 drivers were released way back in February of 2024. The 555 drivers were released in June 2024. So, I really do not see why they did not make it in. We are on 576 already.

It is going to really suck for Wayland if Debian users are stuck on old NVIDIA drivers and continue to complain that Wayland does not work for years yet to come.

Old NVIDIA drivers

Posted Jul 24, 2025 7:22 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (2 responses)

The drivers in `non-free`?

Those are not Debian's priority. Explicitly so, per the social contract. If someone really needs non-free software, and needs it to be prioritised by the distro (e.g. bugs in packaging will block releases), maybe Debian isn't the best distro for that use case?

Old NVIDIA drivers

Posted Jul 24, 2025 20:51 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (1 responses)

Ya sure. Wonderful.

I do not use Debian on the desktop, certainly not with NVIDIA. Let's hope that the many, many people that own NVIDIA hardware and DO use Debian as a desktop take your suggestion to heart.

Because my actual point was "It is going to really suck for Wayland if Debian users are stuck on old NVIDIA drivers and continue to complain that Wayland does not work for years yet to come." If you addressed my point, I missed it.

As for the social contract...it says: "Our priorities are our users and...". It continues, "We will be guided by the needs of our users...We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environments."

So, ship broken stuff? You are the Debian expert but, by my read, I think that shipping a working version of a component that you are shipping either way would be quite compatible with, maybe even required by, the social contract.

Alas, we get a few more years of "Wayland is not ready" from Debian desktop users and users of distros that inherit these packages. Awesome.

Old NVIDIA drivers

Posted Jul 24, 2025 22:39 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

There will usually be more up-to-date NVIDIA packages in the backport suite. The experimental suite carries 555 already.

Old NVIDIA drivers

Posted Jul 24, 2025 17:43 UTC (Thu) by docontra (guest, #153758) [Link]

Nvidia drivers come in standard and "LTS"-ish variants; 555 is standard, with 550 being the nearest previous LTS-ish one. The first LTS-ish Nvidia driver with Explicit Sync is 570, which (apparently) was released in Jan/Feb 2025.

Although I do feel you with the Explicit Sync support; on my workplace I have a couple of users with an Nvidia GPU running KDE Neon[a], and they all had to go back to the X11 session due to extreme flickering on Xwayland apps (particularly Chromium/Electron based). Now they're rocking the 570 driver and at least one of them (the most tech-savvy of the bunch) is running on Wayland with little grumbling.

[a]: I know, I know; despite some hairy compat issues with other Ubuntu software (wine and inkscape come to mind) all of them are happy on KDE Neon and have tolerated the warts so far.