this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Which distro??? How did you choose? Have you played with different distros before? What took 14 hrs?
I dual booted Mint a long time ago mostly just to try the whole dual booting thing and to see if I could do it but it never stuck.
This whole thing started yesterday because I saw someone doing some really cool desktop customizations with Plasma(?). So all I really knew was I wanted something with good documentation, is stable, and had kde plasma.
What I didn’t know was how NVIDIA operates as a company and Debians philosophy as an org. I spent a lot of time trying to get nvidia drivers to work the way I need them to on Debian, cuz it turns out I agree with them on a lot of how they think but the support just isn’t there. Nouveau worked great out of the box but trying to run any games properly was a different story.
After that I settled on Fedora KDE, I had some minor issues with their install process which i think were also caused by nvidia, but I managed to solve that and get the drivers sorted pretty quickly.
I used this method to install the nvidia drivers on Debian. I have the driver version 580.105 installed, newer drivers are causing bugs for me. The repository contains pinning packages to stay on a certain driver version.
https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/debian.html
I knew I should have asked here first when I thought about it yesterday. I looked at Debians documentation and about a billion threads and GitHub repos and the only thing I didn’t think to check was nvidias documentation. I feel stupid.
For a LONG time, the conventional wisdom was to shun the packages provided by Nvidia (as well as AMD in the proprietary FGLRX days) in favor of distro packages. These hardware companies used to ship distro-agnostic installers which would install the drivers and tweak the config files once, but they did not integrate with the package manager at all, and would inevitably break the next time you update your OS. The only way to use these drivers reliably was for distro maintainers to re-package them.
Nowadays, AMD support is automatic (built into the kernel / Mesa3D), and Nvidia actually hosts their own package repositories instead of just a self-destructing installer. You should still prefer a distro package if its available, but the knee-jerk "never download the Nvidia driver from Nvidia" advice is not as true as it used to be.
The documentation is confusing. The official debian wiki does have a link to the page. That repository is maintained by Nvidia for datacenter usage but it works for desktop drivers as well.
The page below has a tool for how to add the Nvidia repo on different distros. It also has the option to set up your own local repo. Do not use the install script named "runfile", it could brick your distro install. Only install the nvidia driver through the distro package manager.
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads
I do see that line about data center stuff and I think that just made me disregard it. tbh the entire documentation just kept giving nvidia the finger and kinda just made me feel like should go somewhere else lol
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I switched from Nvidia to AMD for the simple reason that Linux support (out of the box) seems better. Plus AMD just looks (slightly less bad) by virtue of not being like half of the US economy. Oh it also helps that modern AMD cards can actually legit compete with Nvidia cards by now. Or surpass them in some respects like price / money ratio.
I picked a 9060XT 16GB for my recent build because it has good performance and vram capacity for the price, I don't give a shit about ray tracing, the drivers aren't actively hostile, and AMD isn't the primary driver of the AI slop bubble.
I did the exact same thing, and my frame rates in-game have never been better.
Not surprised it was nvidia's fault lol, every time I have problems after upgrading my system it's because nvidia broke something.