this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Can you please elaborate on why? I'm running Debian stable with NVIDIA drivers and... it "just works". I'm using Steam to get Proton and game content (e.g. was playing Elden Ring minutes ago). I didn't tinker much so wondering what I could be missing.
Throw a distro like Nobara or Bazzite on and see what you get. You might have it optimized quite well, but chances are that the kernel version is far enough behind that many of the graphics tweaks aren't compatible. nVidia open drivers have come a long way in a very short time, and they rely on newer kernels.
You should just be able to shrink a partition and dual boot between distros, or put another drive in and use that.
That being said if youre looking for performance, the last thing you'd want is open source nvidia drivers; theyre built entirely off reverse engineering, which takes time. This allows for large performance gains like those of late.
The proprietary stack hasn't had much change in performance over the last couple updates, a couple have even result in a performance regression to push new features. As of the latest preview driver (565.77) the minimum kernel supported goes back to the 4.15 Linux kernel release. This technically means you'd be able to run the latest nvidia drivers on anything newer than Debian 10 buster, which went out of support in September 2022.
Sounds like you might have gotten some of your info sources crossed - but thats exactly why distros like Bazzite exist, you dont have to worry about any of this background compatibility bs.
Pretty sure that is not true anymore since a couple of years. Only newer cards can capitalise the gains from the 'official' open drivers though.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-towards-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/
Only sort of, quoting this article
So while they did 'open source' their drivers, theyre also not accepting contributions that aren't in house. The codebase is too locked down to benefit other projects like NVK, as a true FOSS project would be.
Presumably because things like Mesa and video drivers would be somewhat out of date
Drivers are 535 on stable, cf https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers so it's definitely not the very latest yet even though drivers are important I doubt (and please share benchmarks if I'm way off) there is a radical performance difference.
Oh I'm not advocating that you switch distributions. If you're happy with performance there's no reason to change.
The only thing that gives me pause with outdated drivers is the possibility of being exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities. But in my experience Debian does provide updates when it's critical.
Theres a difference between stable and outdated. Generally bleeding edge will introduce many more vulnerabilities than will go unnoticed in stable.
Debian is known (almost exclusively) for only updating their repo when they're certain it is safe, but also rapidly pushing security patches; its a server oriented distro where security is paramount.
Yeah I'm thinking bout trying something new because Nvidia just put out new drives to fix a security issue but mint hasn't seemed to update the driver manager.