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Comment by internet101010 | Hacker News Reader

KVMs do tend to cause issues, especially when it comes to power management and waking from sleep. However, just two weeks ago I had issues with Debian when connecting directly to a monitor. Booting from the live image with a Nvidia GPU resulted in 1024x768 garbage. Surely the installer will take care of that and the open drivers will be sufficient. Surely.

Nope. I had to reinstall and the option to add the proprietary repository was not as obvious nor as emphasized as it should have been. It almost seemed like an intentional snub at Nvidia. I bailed for other desktop-related issues and ran back home to another distro.

But maybe Debian doesn't want to focus on desktop users and that's fine - they can continue to rule their kingdom of hypervisor cities filled with docker containers. The world needs that too.

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> It almost seemed like an intentional snub at Nvidia.

I don't think anybody can come up with better intentional snubs at Nvidia than the Nvidia itself.

When it comes to their older graphics hardware, their drivers just refuse to work with newer kernels. GPU was capable to draw windows and play videos for a decade, but then, after a kernel update, it doesn't even show 1024x768 "garbage". Just black screen.

So effectively, buying Nvidia to use with Linux equals to buying hardware with expiration date.

I'm surprised the reverse-engineering folks that like jailbreaking game consoles and decompiling game ROMs, aren't all over the idea of decompiling old Nvidia drivers to modify + recompile them to speak to modern kernel APIs.

Such folks usually have modern GPUs, so they don't experience such problems.

Once a card is old enough you might have to switch to the Nouveau driver instead, which is probably fine since using a card that old on a modern machine suggests you aren't that interested in games or VR.

There is no other choice but Nouveau. But it's not that fine because it means losing hardware video decoding.

> using a card that old on a modern machine suggests

It's an old laptop. Totally adequate for scrolling web, watching movies and arguing about very important stuff on Hacker News. There is no way to change GPU there or switch to integrated Intel one.

> which is probably fine since using a card that old on a modern machine suggests you aren't that interested in games or VR

I think a more correct assumption is that you're likely interested in running games of at most the era the computer was purchased in. It'd be a shame if your 7-year-old GPU going out-of-support with a distro upgrade, meant that you suddenly become unable to run the 7-year-old games you've been happily playing up until that point.

It it really only 7 years? nVidia still lists driver support on their website for the GeForce GTX 600 on Linux, a card that is 12 years old.

https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/226760/en...

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