The problem with NV drivers is multi-layered:
- The root cause is that they are closed-source of course.
- As the modules are developed out of the mainline kernel, there's nothing stopping Nvidia from violating kernel's conventions and best practices. On Windows, to get its modules signed by M$, Nvidia needs to meet some minimum standards, but on Linux they can do whatever crazy sh*t they please... As an example,
amdgpuandmodesettinguse DRM's scheduler for GPU tasks, butnvidiaby default does not give a flying F.nvidia-drmmay be used by apps (at least those performing graphic stuff), but compute workloads still mostly ignore any kernel scheduling. Another example is effectively non-existent swapping between VRAM and host RAM by the driver (apps need to do it manually). - The next problem is NV dropping support for older GPUs. Recently Pascal (10xx), Volta and Maxwell have entered security-maintenance-only mode and will be completely unsupported by NV by 2028. Combined with their proprietary nature, this behavior is particularly anti-consumer. Not to mention even older yet still sufficient for many tasks Kepler.
- On top of that, Debian is very slow to package new driver versions. As a result, Blackwell (50xx) is currently completely unsupported by any Debian-packaged driver (I filed 1123801 regarding this). Not to mention all the improvements and bug-fixes coming with newer releases, that are particularly important for Wayland that is still changing quite dynamically. Therefore currently the best option in case of the default DE is to use drivers from the NV's DC repo, which for Trixie contains only v590, so if you have a Pascal or Volta or Maxwell, you need to hack your way by installing 580 from Bookworm... Most new users will be unable to do it
![:(]( "Sad")
Unfortunately NV GPUs are very popular, so if Debian is serious about its own adoption, they at least need to improve on packaging.
Statistics: Posted by morgwai — 2026-02-01 00:29