Comment by dima55

8 hours ago

Debian is great, and is where the distro development actually happens. What doesn't it do that you want?

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 Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones, but there’s a semi-official PPA with more recent versions.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?

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 I can't say if they're "outdated" or how different they are from what ubuntu ships, but they've always worked very well for me.

  • Debian offers Nvidia drivers as well although they tend to be outdated.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 think Pop does Nvidia well, but have no real experience with that.

    • 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.

      1 reply →

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 Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones

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

  • 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    The information on their wiki may be a year out of date.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.