I’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 Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones, but there’s a semi-official PPA with more recent versions.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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dima55 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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 I can't say if they're "outdated" or how different they are from what ubuntu ships, but they've always worked very well for me.

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throwaway2046 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Debian offers Nvidia drivers as well although they tend to be outdated.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.

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throw0101a 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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 Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones […]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?

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ntoskrnl_exe 2 days ago | parent [-]

Awesome, this must be a recent thing, when I last checked about a year ago the latest drivers from restricted were a couple versions behind. Many people always complained about it on reddit, AskUbuntu etc, which is where I found out about the PPA.

	▲	throw0101a 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		We deployed 570 and 580 in the April-June 2025 time frame, so I'm not sure what you were looking at, but they've tried to keep up with the latest for a while.

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gspr 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can get an overview of that status by looking at the "version" box on https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nvidia-graphics-drivers

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tormeh 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think Pop does Nvidia well, but have no real experience with that.

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neor 2 days ago | parent [-]

I have used Pop OS for years and for me it was the most smooth desktop environment I've ever used.

They have been working on a custom Desktop Environment which sadly still isn't very stable yet. Promising development, but putting me off of using Pop for a while.

	▲	Tostino 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I just put the new popos on my laptop and am still running the old version on my primary desktop. Agreed that Cosmic is not quite ready for prime time yet, but it is pretty impressive the state it's in for how new it is. Haven't had any show stopping bugs on the laptop, just a few small quirks.

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ErroneousBosh 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones

Ubuntu 24.04 currently comes with 590, which is the most recent working driver.

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ButlerianJihad 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.