reverting busted Nvidia drivers on Debian

2026-04-30

the richest company in the world

is bloating their software with bullshit. and it comes as no surpise, in large part due to AI (Artificial*ahem*Incompetence). apparently they're pushing 3x more code across 30,000 developers with Cursor, a new AI-assisted dev platform. here's a few quick bullet-points from them with some minor translations penciled in-between:

if that doesn't already sound great, just let the man with a plan lay it all out for you:

Each of NVIDIA's product lines has a complex codebase that is evolving quickly. It's very hard for developers to stay on top of these changes and understand the entirety of the codebase. This is where Cursor really shines.

"My mission here is to embed AI in every step of the software development life-cycle."

-- Wei Luo (VP of Engineering).

capitalist speak for: our codebase is deprecated, and poorly maintained as we prioritize product cycles aimed to maximize quarterly profit and YoY growth rather than sustainability. our source is so spaghetti that the team behind it doesn't even know what's wrong with it anymore. eventually we hope the artificial system will be self-sufficient and we can get rid of everyone on our development payroll.

....if you would like to comiserate more with another creator about this sad state of affairs, please enjoy the most relatable video i've ever seen from Posy!

for real tho, i feel so bad for the people (practically saints) working on porting Nvidia's Game Ready Drivers dumpster-fires of code for proponents of free-software to even have the option to use hardware they're practically forced to purchase from a monopoly (sorry AMD, they sweeped the laptop market)

we have to go back (from 580 to 550)

so, the latest Nvidia drivers packaged with my Debian 13 distro (MX25) have introduced jank on my system, and i'm not alone! it kind of surprised me, only since Debian is known for packaging drivers so much later than others to prioritize stability, but turns out the latest and greatest from Team Green is so poorly maintained with bloated AI that even native Windows users are struggling :-)))

my laptop gpu = NVIDIA GA106M [GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile / Max-Q]

thankfully my glitches were minimal (taskbar/panel + terminal windows flickering, as well as Steam for some reason??) but annoying enough to make me restore a system backup and postpone any sudo apt update runs for a couple months lol. anyways, i finally got round to looking up how to manually set my GPU drivers to revert back to v550 and live a stable life.

quick diy

thankfully MX25 includes a GUI for package management, Synaptic, so searching for all previous packages was *much* easier. i highlighted every entry containing nvidia-tesla-550 and re-downloaded all those.

nvidia-tesla-550 packages

now run sudo update-glx --config nvidia in a fresh terminal. this lets us set the driver manually, it remakes a boot image so just reboot for changes to apply. full stop, i don't remember where i found this command on these forums, so bless whoever the hell posted it ::emote-laughing-crying-shitting::

nvidia-terminal-config

note: i also had to reinstall Steam as flatpak, bc the .deb package on my distro was still trying to run it w latest nvidia drivers for some reason.

then i moved installed games to the new default location: OLD:/home/<user>/.steam/steam/steamapps/ NEW:/home/<user>/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/

more reference