Old NVIDIA drivers

Posted Jul 24, 2025 7:22 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
In reply to: Old NVIDIA drivers by jmalcolm
Parent article: Prokop: What to expect from Debian/trixie

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.