Working combination of Linux distro, boot options, and NVIDIA Drivers for RTX 5060?

I’m trying to install Linux to a setup with the following (key components only):

ASUS PRIME B550M-A WIFI II Motherboard
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5060 WINDFORCE 8G
AMD Ryzen 5 5600 Desktop Processor

I’ve tried multiple operating systems (Debian, Ubuntu, etc), dozens of boot options, and drivers (both NVIDIA and nouveau). As a general rule:

  • I need to use nomodeset or boot fails, but that’s no drama.
  • If I use acpi=off I generally can get in, but I’m stuck with a single core processor after that.
  • acpi=ht doesn’t help at all, which made me suspect the CPU, but I don’t think that’s the actual case (see below).
  • I’ve had some luck with pci=realloc=off instead of acpi=off.

Without these the typical result is that a live USB will boot up, or an installer will run, but once I either start things from the live USB or try to run an installed distro, the screen will go black (sometimes with minimal text before it) but will never recover, sometimes will spin up the case fans, sometimes will drop out and fail in initramfs. If I use a successful set of options, the system boots up quickly OR takes minutes after a black screen and then comes up.

A fresh install of Windows works fine.

If I switch the RTX 5060 out and drop in a cheapie card (ASUS Phoenix GeForce GT 1030 OC, 2GB), things generally work fine and sometimes immediately.

I also have a separate PC with similar specs (but a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5060 Ti EAGLE OC ICE 16G instead) and it exhibits similar issues, though it is not tested as thoroughly.

I’ve tried with Debian distro-packaged NVIDIA driver packages and the NVIDIA binary one myself. No luck.

Sometimes when I install the NVIDIA binary driver, disabling nouveau results in a system that won’t boot, so it’s hard to test each driver version without a complete reinstall.

I know no combination that works with the NVIDIA binary driver.

I’ve made dozens of attempts across different configurations.

I don’t mind doing a complete reinstall, in fact I’m doing multiple test installs already.

Could anyone suggest a combination of Linux distribution, kernel options, and NVIDIA binary driver that is know to work with a RTX 5060? If I have that starting point I can dig further and determine the point it breaks.

…And yet you failed to provide a single bug report file or even a single line from logs…

Have you even bothered to read the wiki:

Currently no Debian-packaged version supports Blackwell GPUs (for example RTX 50xx series).

It’s virtually impossible to help you given how little information you provided, but my totally wild guess based on the meta information that you didn’t bother to ready ANY proper documentation (just some random posts about random boot options) and that you did not reassured that you were trying the open flavor, is that you were using the proprietary one, which does not support Blackwell. Also further evidenced by the fact that 1030 worked fine.