Still, the risks of instability and slight potential security issues will increase using the bleeding edge drivers. The bleeding edge will be the go-to for gamers with the latest cards requiring the most up-to-date packages. For older cards, use the default Nvidia repository, and recommended packages should be installed. The decision on which drivers to install will come down mainly with the age of the card.
In the tutorial, you learned how to install the latest stable or beta drivers on your Debian 11 Bullseye Desktop. It is not advised to install these drivers if you need to replace 390xx to 340xx but be warned that Debian does not recommend this. The 340 series can technically be installed however, it is no longer supported, and several major security flaws exist in those drivers. Next, run the “nvidia-smi” command to verify the installation.
Once complete, do not forget to reboot your system. The process is the same, just with a new install command: sudo apt install nvidia-legacy-390xx-driver firmware-misc-nonfree -y If your Nvidia Graphics card is quite old from 400 Series downwards, you will need to install the legacy drivers. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Nvidia Graphic Drivers using Debian’s repositories.
In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, along with lacking the newest features, software technology, and support for the latest graphics card hardware. For the most part, this is acceptable however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers. Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Debian come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards.