Reading this post, developers are using that concept by putting the driver in the opt folder https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/c … /124836/15

However they are having to use the the utility prefix,  open gl prefix and 32 bit compatibility libraries to avoid messing up the usr bin folders and the usr libraries. The prefixes used and what they do is in the Nvidia installer code options section https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-instal … on_table.h

We can see in this post that a user called wild tux https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/l … tall/46411 had to set x prefix back to usr.
These links help infer the risk of having X11  items sandboxed and hence why the defaults for these are not to sandbox to avoid a display server crash

This is far as I have got. I then started getting a bit lost. It would need someone with more experience to advise if this kind of approach has any legs

1. The Cuda drivers are proprietary not open source.
2. The Nvidia guide talks of creating a preferences.d file to ensure pinning is applied to ensure only the 580 version is used when later updates are run https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesl … cking.html
3. The log file here explains why the pinning method is advised by Nvidia https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/d … nts/353805
4. The NVDC section of the Debian wiki advises to use the pinning method with caveats. https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsD … 2_.26_D-13

This might or might not help. I am new to Devuan and not a developer, but sharing incase of use

I have no personal experience with MX.

I stay away from that special graphics company since I started with Linux more than 20 years ago.

Unfortunately, the old advice still stands. As Debian "freeze" the stable release, the Nvidia proprietary driver will most likely remain at that version. So the usual course of action is to install from the Nvidia shellscript (and reinstall from that after every kernel update). As it's a proprietary driver, no backporting of any security fixes is possible.

I have always taken the view that Debian simply should not have packaged these from day one, as this is old ground we have been going over for the last 20+ years.

The Debian wiki article discourages Nvidia hardware and also highlights the "planned obsolescence" aspects - but this is also relevant to AMD and Intel, which it appears to endorse.

https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesl … dates.html

Therefore for cards older than the GTX 16xx series (that require the proprietary kernel modules) the only options are either use the generic unpackaged Linux driver from the Nvidia driver download page ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/ ) with all the mess that causes on the filesystem, or wait and hope that the Debian maintainers make the drivers available as deb package in backports.

Or does anyone here have a better idea?

The minimum driver version that has fixes for those CVEs is 580.178.04

Debian is stuck on 550.163.01 even for unstable, there is no sign of the 580 branch drivers (or any even newer branch), not even in experimental: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nvidia-graphics-drivers

To be fair Debian doesn't officially support the Nvidia drivers as they are in the non-free repo so if they want they can just ignore this (although it looks very bad having such important drivers with so many CVEs in an official repo).

Nvidia themselves provide an official  repo with driver packages for Debian 13, but the oldest driver branch in this repo is 590 which only works for newer cards (GTX 16xx onwards): https://developer.download.nvidia.com/c … 13/x86_64/
Switching to this repo could be a good solution for anyone with newer cards (GTX 16xx onwards).

I have a GTX 1050 so I need the 580.xx driver branch.

Nvidia has the 580.178.04 driver (the version with all CVEs fixed) both in their Ubuntu 24.04 and in their Debian 12 repos:
https://developer.download.nvidia.com/c … 12/x86_64/
https://developer.download.nvidia.com/c … 04/x86_64/

I read that some people installed the 580.xx drivers from the Debian 12 repo on Debian 13 and apparently it worked for them.

OTOH Ubuntu 2404 seems to be more version-aligned with Debian 13 / Devuan 6 than Debian 12.
Do you think that on Devuan 6 it might be a better idea to try the 580.xx drivers for Ubuntu 2404 or the ones for Debian 12?

Or should I continue to wait and hope that the Debian Nvidia driver maintainers eventually catch up and make the patched 580.178.04 driver available in Debian 13 backports?
Is there any chance that this will happen within the next few weeks?

What are other Devuan 6 + Nvidia users here planning to do?