Installing Nvidia drivers on Debian 13 in 2026

May 7th, 2026 Posted in Computer, Linux

Installing Nvidia drivers on Debian 13 in 2026

So I’ve been running Ubuntu 24 for a few weeks as my work machine and have soon found things that make me hate it on a daily basis. I set up Debian 13 on a portable SSD to try that out and found it much more to my liking, coming from a Mac background.

All was going well setting it up until I installed the Nvidia graphics drivers.

After reading r/debian on Reddit it seems there are multiple issues hampering attempts to get up to date Nvidia drivers for my 3060ti on Debian 13. Debian is slow and stable, so takes its time releasing driver packages for third party kit like Nvidia graphics cards (their version is v550 as of May 2026) . That’s fine for stability, but I want to game on this machine too, so need more up to date drivers (v595 as of May 2026).

After spending way too long on this Debian graphics driver install, my take home points are:

Be wary of random Github install scripts

There are some tempting install scripts on Github that claim to make this process easier, but they are out of date from what I can tell, so I swerved them.

Don’t use the Nvidia .run file

Nvidia provide an executable driver package from their website.

I found out the hard way why Reddit advised against using this.

It put files everywhere and apt can’t uninstall or upgrade them, so I had to find and remove each file and config setting that was breaking my system. This took several hours of command line pain and suffering with Gemini helping. I’d have been screwed without that AI help, even if it did give me slightly wrong info sometimes.

While this seemed fine at first and I played ARC Raiders using these drivers, installing some small desktop app a few days later triggered an apt upgrade that I didn’t ask for, which completely hosed the graphics driver and resulted in a black screen on reboot. It seems to try and overwrite the Nnvidia run file drivers with official Debian packages, and just destroys the config.

Use the Nvidia datacenter repo & drivers

The Nvidia repo can install the latest driver. There was a process of adding that and setting apt to look there (details to follow).

This Reddit thread has good info from ‘linuxologue’ – https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/1jyzgrx/the_correct_way_to_install_newer_nvidia_drivers/

I needed the cuda-drivers though to install DKMS and nvidia-smi properly. nvidia-drivers looks like it works but doesn’t actually install them so I got stuck in a loop.

Feb 26 SHA certificates

There’s some fuckery around SHA signatures used to secure the repo or drivers, not sure if that is related to the above issue. It definitely stopped me doing something during this whole process.

Misc

There were honestly so many things wrong after the apt upgrade that I think it was multiple issues causing the black screen, and i’m not 100% whether these are all to do with the driver mismatch.

  • My $PATH didn’t have the right entries to find dkms
  • Too many config files conflicting with each  other;
    • /etc/udev/rules.d/60-nvidia. rules needed deleting
    • Various files and settings in /etc/modprobe.d/ needed deleting
    • /usr/bin/nvidia-modprobe needed deleting
    • /etc/initramfs-tools/modules contained a line about bochs which needed deleting

What worked

I followed the Reddit thread above and https://linuxcapable.com/install-nvidia-drivers-on-debian/ for the most part, and installed cuda-drivers instead of nvidia-drivers. After then cleaning up all those config files above (plus more that I can’t even remember now) it booted to desktop again!

I’m tempted to ‘pin’ the Nvidia driver now to stop it getting interfered with again.

Credits

Helpful blog and image above from https://linuxcapable.com/install-nvidia-drivers-on-debian/