Is there a good way to roll back the nvidia driver to an older version? I need 470 for my vr headset, as newer versions seem to disable video output to the headset. I have tried some logical stuff like sudo apt remove --purge nvidia-driver and also some more radical stuff like sudo apt remove --purge “^nvidia-*” but that somehow left all my drivers intact, and I am still on the newest version 525.147.05. Does someone know on how step back?

  • people_are_cute@lemmy.sdf.org
    4·
    9 months ago

    Debian bookworm (12) ships with version 525, so that’s all you’ll get officially.

    Debian bullseye (11) is the one that comes with version 470. So clean-installing that is the best bet.

    Or you can try to download a driver package from Nvidia’s website and try to manually install it in an overcomplicated process that involves patching your kernel with dkms. In my personal experience this almost always breaks things and is not recommended.

    This is one of the drawbacks with Debian’s “stability”. Every stable version of Debian is a standalone, monolithic bundle of software that rarely allows for version changes.

    If possible I’ll suggest you shift to Mint. It comes with a dedicated GUI driver manager for installing and switching multiple driver versions.

    • Smorty [she/her]OP
      4·
      9 months ago

      I actually got it to work. I ran these commands: sudo apt remove --purge nvidia sudo reboot #(Reboots the system) sudo apt install nvidia-tesla-470-driver sudo reboot #(Reboots the system)

      And BAM! I got the right driver for the job! Version 470 obtained!

  • EccTM@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    It looks like Debian 12 only provides 525, 390 and a legacy 340 driver, based on the wiki. As @people_are_cute@lemmy.sdf.org mentioned, Debian 11 has a 470 driver, but that would be a different set of repositories that would probably not work great for you on Debian 12.

    The actual latest Nvidia driver is 550 as of a few days ago, so maybe you could try a manual install of either the latest or 470? I’m not sure if anything like downgrade or frogging-family\nvidia-all exists for Debian, I *sigh* use Arch Linuxbtw.

  • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
    1·
    9 months ago

    You cannot install older nvidia driver on a new OS because it only works with old versions of kernel and X.org. All driver versions that are compatible to Debian release are provided in its non-free repo, so if there’s no nvidia 470, it is incompatible with Debian 12.