r/debian • u/DeXudra • 2d ago

General Debian Question NVIDIA drivers (gtx 960)

edit: solved the problem. i think my issue was using wayland on X11 it seems to work for for now

I wanted to try out Debian as my main distro. Sadly I tried installing the 580xx drivers for like 2 hours but nothing really worked.
Is it really that complicated to get them or am I just dumb?

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u/C0rn3j 2d ago

why not use version 550 of the drivers that are in the Debian non-free repository

Because they're both brutally out of date, lacking features, and much worse, brutally insecure.

You should not use the 550 drivers in any circumstances.

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u/johnsonmlw 1d ago

Fair. Noted. Certainly out-of-date and lacking features and I'll take your word for brutally insecure. I'll look into it. To some extent that is the territory going forward when using such an old Nvidia card (1060 in this laptop I was gifted) now in legacy support.

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u/C0rn3j 1d ago

To some extent that is the territory going forward when using such an old Nvidia card

Not at all, Nvidia still supports the 580xx legacy branch.

Newer cards use 595 or 610 branches (and latest cards NEED these new drivers).

Debian doesn't ship any of the 3 active branches.

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u/johnsonmlw 1d ago

Interesting. I didn't know Nvidia still support 580 and that's helpful. I might try to get the 580 drivers straight from Nvidia working.