Hello Nvidia Linux community. I am both new on the forum and new with Nvidia on Linux altogether because I have switched from Radeon 6800XT to RTX 5070 Ti a couple of weeks ago.
I use Debian Trixie which packs Nvidia driver 550 which is rather old, and considering Wayland improvements are happening rather fast and I also play video games I did a bit research and found out that Nvidia has Debian 11 and Debian 12 repositories. I imagine Debian 13 repository is not too far off, but I gave Debian 12 Nvidia repository a shot on my Trixie and it works. I have successfully installed driver version 580. Everything works except GTK4 apps freeze on close, which was fixed in the current production driver. And this leads me to the actual question:
How come Nvidia’s Debian repo does not contain the current version of production drivers? I have checked on this URL Download The Latest Official GeForce Drivers for the list of production drivers and neither 580, nor 575, nor 570 drivers are up to date in the above linked Debian repository which begs the question who this repository is for?
I am a bit confused on what would be the best way to keep-up with the current production branch on Debian Stable? I am not interested in beta versions or new feature drivers. I only want production branch, but I would love it to be up to date.
It’s been requested a few weeks ago, so far no answer from the Nvidia packaging team:
The apt repo contains Data Center drivers and has different priorities and release schedule than desktop “Unix” drivers distributed as .run files. A fix for a bug in GTK is no reason to change the DC stuff and risk other regressions.
As of 580.76.05 (latest production as of the writing of this), it isn’t yet. A fix is queue’ed up and it should be in the next release.
I don’t use Debian, but I’d recommend to stick to 570.181 if the repos have it (previous still supported production branch, released about 20 days ago and not that old – Edit: 575.64.05 NFB is fine too for now, albeit 575.x branch won’t get new releases) until the next version of the 580.x branch, or alternatively you can stop GTK4 apps from using Vulkan by exporting GSK_RENDERER=ngl temporarily.
Edit: note that these versions are non-datacenter releases so if it’s a datacenter repo odds are you won’t see them.
Recently the new NVidia Driver seem like locked their kernel validation to lower than 6.8, make kernel cannot build the module, so I think they are limiting and start to release repository for Debian 13 now.
Yesterday I saw them push new directory Debian 13 to the repository but only have sbsa for now. I still wait for their x64 repository to update completely.