I Need Help Understanding the repo NVIDIA drivers.

brent

Well....which is the "open-source' Nvidia driver for which there is some modicum of control?
By contrast, which is these is full-on proprietary and likely to cause problems?

nvidia-390-glx-driver-current or nvidia-glx-driver-current

My PC has been down for the last 24 hrs after updates with the WSOD ("Oh no! Something has gone wrong etc").

After 24 hrs of troubleshooting and reading I installed one of these drivers (390) and I am back with the living. I simply want to know the risks of having the 390 installed?

Thanks you kindly for anything you can tell me. edit/typo

Staudey

The open-source Nvidia driver is "nouveau", part of Mesa and not an Nvidia project. All driver packages with "nvidia" in the name are closed-source/binary blob drivers directly from Nvidia.

The nouveau driver lacks a lot of features and hardware support (not bashing them, they're doing amazing work with what they get from Nvidia). I guess for an older PC and as a non-gamer you can live with it; otherwise it's a pain.
Not sure what your specific problem was. The nvidia-390-glx-driver packages are meant for older GPUs that aren't supported with the newest driver generation.

(then there are the "beta" and "developer" drivers, but you don't need to concern yourself with those)

brent

Staudey
thank you, what a great education!
I upgraded recently to a newer rig, however.

so...begs the question: why have the already-installed nouveau drivers fail me on two disks after updates?
(doflicky picks these nouveaus on a fresh install., not me. do I have the wrong 'nouvea'?

Or all these red-herrings for other issues? (getting a few "Oh N0!" death screens lately.)
edit: I restored two crashed HDD's today just by installing the nvidia 390's. What does that mean?

Staudey

Not sure what to say about the rest, but seeing as you have a "GT 430" the nvidia-390-glx are the correct ones at least (the nvidia-glx-driver only supports the 600 series and up).

brent (doflicky picks these nouveaus on a fresh install., not me. do I have the wrong 'nouvea'?

Just to be clear: DoFlicky doesn't install noveau, only proprietary drivers (i.e. the nvidia- packages). Noveau is installed by default for basic hardware support.

brent

I sure don't like this at all. But X.org as a vendor seems downright saintly.

Solus hardware driver default nouveau= white ("oh no!) screen of death lately--the last month to be sure. No booting the operating system. Dead.

Nvidia 390 proprietary = has salvaged two solus budgie operating systems from the white screen of death and allowed the operating system to boot.
Lightdm and greeter packages always fine...heck all packages always fine which does nothing for troubleshooting.
Hardware? Because I have an nvidia gpu and never installed nvidia drivers til today? Who decided the nouvueas should fail?
Weirdness....

What is missing in this rude cause and effect? What am I missing? How long will this fix hold? I have no context for this correlation. Help my brain🙂--thanks.

brent

I'm also reading multiple 'flavour' forum posts with a consistent theme: any dodgy moves proprietary driver NVIDIA makes in response to an update will cause White Oh No! Screen of Death as well.

So I get it coming and going.

So now I have to find a way to whitelist the nouveu's just in case....

...why did my nouveus recently fail me, crash the system, and impede booting?
If NVIDIA saved me then who wrecked me?

brent

Staudey Thank you, I have a much clearer picture now.