I installed Debian 13 on my laptop from 2014. It's got an NVIDIA K1100M. The latest proprietary driver supporting it is 390 which is not supported by Debian 13. It was by Debian 11. I skipped 12. I run Nouveau and Wayland and everything that didn't work with Wayland on Debian 11 works now, with one unfortunate exception: backlight control is broken, which means that I'm stuck with 100% brightness. That's probably a problem with the kernel or the driver because it happens with X11 too.

X11 has a workaround for that because I can use gamma correction to simulate brightness control and make it work with night light. There was no way to do it in Wayland: they stomp on each other and undo whatever the other software did. So I'm back to X11 and frankly I don't notice any difference.

If you have more luck with your graphic card you'll be probably OK with Wayland. Anyway the X11 session is there, logout from Wayland and login using X11.

▲ ryao 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Nvidia likely will back port Debian 13 support to their driver if you ask nicely in an email to their Linux bugs email address, although you would probably wait 3 to 6 months for it. They periodically back port support for newer systems to older drivers that they maintain.

Alternatively, it is theoretically possible to forward port their driver yourself since their kernel compatibility shims are open source and you can see what changes they made in newer versions to support newer kernels. This is likely a masochistic exercise however.

▲ lproven 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's got an NVIDIA K1100M. The latest proprietary driver supporting it is 390 which is not supported by Debian 13. It was by Debian 11.

Tell me more, please.

Does it only have an nVidia or is it dual GPU and switching?

Because I have the latter and the lack of GPU drivers is keeping me on Ubuntu 22.04.

Is it possible you're just using the Intel GPU and your nVidia is inactive?

▲ pmontra 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm still dual booting. Debian 11 to work and Debian 13 to finish setting up everything.

With Debian 11, kernel 5.10.0-35-amd64

I was sure that I was using the NVIDIA driver 390 but I run dpkg -l before replying to you and I found out that actually I'm running the 470.256.02 driver. I definitely run the NVIDIA card because NVIDIA X Server Settings is telling me that X Screen 0 is on "Quadro K1100M (GPU 0)". I see it also in /var/log/messages and

  $ lspci -k | grep -A 3 VGA
  01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107GLM [Quadro K1100M] (rev a1)
 DeviceName: 0
 Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company ZBook 15
 Kernel driver in use: nvidia

cpuinfo reports that my CPU is an i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.40GHz which according to the Intel web site has an internal Intel® HD Graphics 4600. I think that I never used it. NVIDIA X Server Settings does not report it but it's a NVIDIA program so I would not be surprised if it does not see it. Anyway, the kernel module for Intel should be i915 and it's not there. Maybe I have to load it but I'm phasing out this version of the OS. I'm pretty sure I never installed anything to switch between the two GPUs. There used to be something called bumblebee. Is that what you are using now?

Apparently I can install the 470 driver in Debian 13 https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=163756 but it's from the unstable distribution and if Nouveau works I'm fine with that. I'm afraid that the NVIDIA driver and Wayland won't mix well even on 13 so I'll be on X11 anyway.

	▲	lproven 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Very interesting. Thanks a lot for this! I will experiment and see if I can get it working. I use older Thinkpads with Optimus switching, so using the Intel GPU is not opotional: it is always on, but the OS offloads GPU-intensive stuff to the nVidia GPU. In my testing with Debian 12, I could not get my nVidia chips recognised at all. In some distros, this has the side-effect of disabling the Displayport output, which is a deal-breaker as I use an external monitor and the machines do not have HDMI.