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tux_99

Member

Registered: 2025-06-17

Posts: 36  

Why does Trixie/Excalibur have two Nvidia driver versions (535 / 550)?

I don't understand why Debian Trixie and therefore also Devuan Excalibur ships with two Nvidia proprietary driver releases.

As far as I can tell the 535 version supports the same cards that the 550 version supports, 535 is not a legacy release for older cards (which would have been a good reason to include it), so I don't see any reason why anyone would use the older 535 version instead of the newer 550 version, but surely there must be a reason why Debian included both?

Does anyone know why 535 might be preferable to 550?

Last edited by tux_99 (2025-11-09 22:00:35)

zapper

Member

Registered: 2017-05-29

Posts: 1,169  

Re: Why does Trixie/Excalibur have two Nvidia driver versions (535 / 550)?

That must mean one of them is more stable then the other if I had to guess.

Although maybe someone more knowledgeable can tell you.

@steve_v feel free to jump in if you know something.

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steve_v

Member

Registered: 2018-01-11

Posts: 540  

Re: Why does Trixie/Excalibur have two Nvidia driver versions (535 / 550)?

feel free to jump in if you know something.

I dont know, care, have any nvidia hardware, or run devuan on anything with a GUI or a real GPU (CLI on matrox BMU graphics over IPMI doesn't count, or need drivers).
Why does it matter anyway? Use whatever is newer, unless you have problems with it. If you really need to know why packaging is the way it is, the place to ask is the Debian mailing list.

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stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn

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Registered: 2023-11-27

Posts: 419  

Re: Why does Trixie/Excalibur have two Nvidia driver versions (535 / 550)?

a thread that might be interesting:

https://www.linux.org/threads/confused-about-nvidia-driver-versions.50056/

tl;dr: a single post:

https://www.linux.org/threads/confused-about-nvidia-driver-versions.50056/post-231555

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tux_99

Member

Registered: 2025-06-17

Posts: 36  

Re: Why does Trixie/Excalibur have two Nvidia driver versions (535 / 550)?

@stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn thanks for the links, they seem to clarify it up to a point.

I also found the following end-of-life table that seems to actually indicate that the 550 drivers where short-lived and are already no longer supported by Nvidia (support ended more than 6 months ago).
https://endoflife.date/nvidia

I wonder how the Debian maintainers will deal with that, will the 550 drivers be replaced by a newer release or simply abandoned?

For now I have chosen the 535 drivers, as they appear to be still supported by Nvidia until June 2026.

NakedRider

Member

Registered: 2025-02-01

Posts: 8  

Re: Why does Trixie/Excalibur have two Nvidia driver versions (535 / 550)?

@tux_99 - That's and interesting find about the 550 drivers not being supported for the last 6 months. Debian Trixie ships with the 550 drivers. There have been many problems with nvidia after Trixie was released. Check out their forum. Tons of threads on this topic...I'm in many of them because, at the time, I was also  using nvidia. I bit the bullet and switch to AMD. End of problem for me.

tux_99

Member

Registered: 2025-06-17

Posts: 36  

Re: Why does Trixie/Excalibur have two Nvidia driver versions (535 / 550)?

Debian Trixie ships with the 550 drivers.

Well it ships with both the 535 and the 550 drivers to choose from, hence this thread.

There have been many problems with nvidia after Trixie was released. Check out their forum.

Could you please post some links to the main threads you are referring to? I had a quick look but couldn't find anything apart from a few short threads about some edge cases (problems with wayland, old unsupported cards, ...).

As I wrote in the previous message I chose to install the 535 drivers on Devuan Excalibur and they are working fine, no issues so far, NVdec, VDPAU and opengl all work as expected with the applications I tested. Still have to test NVenc with handbrake. The only thing I couldn't get working yet is VAAPI, but that seems to be an issue of the nvidia-vaapi-driver package which isn't part of the official nvidia drivers.

Maybe the debian 13 problems with nvidia are a consequence of systemd?

Last edited by tux_99 (Today 00:08:46)