alt Hacker NewsI’m curious about proprietary Nvidia drivers. Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones, but there’s a semi-official PPA with more recent versions. How does Debian handle this?
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Debian offers Nvidia drivers as well although they tend to be outdated. Thankfully you can use Nvidia's official .deb repos to get the latest drivers on both Debian and Ubuntu.
> I’m curious about proprietary Nvidia drivers. Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones […]
I see the latest—580, 590, 595—available (scroll to bottom):
* https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=nvidia-dkms
Am I missing something?
I think Pop does Nvidia well, but have no real experience with that.
> Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones
Ubuntu 24.04 currently comes with 590, which is the most recent working driver.
You can get an overview of that status by looking at the "version" box on https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nvidia-graphics-drivers
Checking out username: FAILED...
Anyway, the main issue with Debian, Ubuntu, and Nvidia is about licensing. GNU/Linux is free software, and Nvidia drivers are not. Loading a non-free driver is known as “Tainting the Kernel”.
https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers
The information on their wiki may be a year out of date. But the principles still apply.
Debian has their own nvidia driver packages (it's nvidia's drivers repackaged in a nice way that integrates with the system well). I can't say if they're "outdated" or how different they are from what ubuntu ships, but they've always worked very well for me.