How To Install nvidia-driver on Debian 12

Learn how to install nvidia-driver on Debian 12 with this tutorial. nvidia-driver is NVIDIA metapackage

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install nvidia-driver on Debian 12.

What is nvidia-driver

nvidia-driver is:

This metapackage depends on the NVIDIA binary driver and libraries that provide optimized hardware acceleration of OpenGL/GLX/EGL/GLES/Vulkan applications via a direct-rendering X Server.

Please see the nvidia-kernel-dkms (nvidia-open-kernel-dkms) or nvidia-kernel-source (nvidia-open-kernel-source) packages for building the kernel module required by this package. This will provide nvidia-kernel-525.105.17 (nvidia-open-kernel-525.105.17).

This version only supports GeForce, NVS, Quadro, RTX, Tesla, … GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, Turing, Ampere or newer architectures. Look at the legacy driver or Tesla driver packages for older cards.

See /usr/share/doc/nvidia-driver/README.txt.gz for a complete list of supported GPUs and PCI IDs.

Building the kernel module has been tested up to Linux 6.2.

There are three methods to install nvidia-driver on Debian 12. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install nvidia-driver Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install nvidia-driver using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install nvidia-driver

Install nvidia-driver Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install nvidia-driver using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install nvidia-driver

Install nvidia-driver Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install nvidia-driver using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install nvidia-driver

How To Uninstall nvidia-driver on Debian 12

To uninstall only the nvidia-driver package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove nvidia-driver

Uninstall nvidia-driver And Its Dependencies

To uninstall nvidia-driver and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 12, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove nvidia-driver

Remove nvidia-driver Configurations and Data

To remove nvidia-driver configuration and data from Debian 12 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge nvidia-driver

Remove nvidia-driver configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove nvidia-driver configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge nvidia-driver

Dependencies

nvidia-driver have the following dependencies:

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install nvidia-driver package on Debian 12 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.