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NVIDIA Beta driver 595.45.04 released for Linux - looks to be an exciting one
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
I don't want exciting I want stable.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
105 points (94.9% liked)
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Yeah no I want exciting too.
I would recommend not installing beta drivers in that case.
I’d recommend avoiding NVidia in general. Their drivers are intensely hit or miss. Any time anything has gone wrong with my PC, NVidia and their shitty drivers have been the culprit.
Any time anything has gone wrong with my PC, NVidia and their shitty drivers have been the culprit.
This seems unlikely. You've never had a hard drive failure, bad RAM, missing dependencies, malware or bugs in any other software except NVIDIA?
You must be one heck of a statistical outlier.
In the past two years? Nope, entirely NVidia. There’s been a bunch of problems, absolutely, but it’s always been NVidia’s garbage drivers at the core of it.
In the past two years? Nope, entirely NVidia.
2 years without a non-video card related problem? I don't think I go 2 weeks without some issue or another (Arch life).
Literally haven't had a single problem on arch that was due to arch in like 6 years.
Nvidia has caused more issues then arch has.
Literally haven’t had a single problem on arch that was due to arch in like 6 years.
Are you guys LLMs? This is English but it doesn't seem to have any correlation to actual reality.
What are you doing that you have constant problems with Linux? What distro, what hardware? I've been using Linux since Slackware decades ago and it's been years since I had to babysit it.
I'm using Arch. There are constant things that need tweaking and adjusting. Configuration-wise I couldn't use the analog and digital outputs of my sound card using the default Pipewire/Wireplumber configuration
Problems this week include things like Freetube failing to work because Google updated YT and a script breaking because Pandas updated to 3.0 when the script uses 2.0.
Not world ending problems, but certainly not in any way graphics card related (I also use an NVIDIA graphics card).
Someone making the statement that they have had no computer problems in years that were not related to their graphics card is simply nonsense or has some trivial explanation, like they have never updated and are suffering from the same problem for years or are defining 'problem' in some limiting way.
Okay, then I think there's a communication issue because I felt you were talking about serious problems with Linux as an operating system. These examples are unavoidable in a decentralized, volunteer model. FreeTube software is failing because it's fighting a corporate entity that is protecting it's revenue - the same will be happening on the Windows version. Unless the script was written as part of Pandas, there's no reason to expect them to 'just work'. That's one independent party doing work that impacts another independent party, and will likely be fixed. That kind problem happens every day in Windows but Windows is not considered unstable because of it.
I've gone 4 years on my Ubuntu laptop (DELL XPS-13) without any serious problems.
My one year old Lenovo Gaming laptop with an NVIDIA chip, however.... Audio randomly stops working and I have to kick-start ALSA to get it going again - Until it just blows out audio entirely and I have to reboot. My only work-around is to use bluetooth audio.
So yeah, NVIDIA has some responsibility here. I don't have any other problems on the Lenovo (also Ubuntu) either. That said, I've had few problems with GenAI or Steam video games like Cyberpunk 2077 on NVIDIA (other than audio), so it isn't all bad.
How? I’m running Tumbleweed on my desktop which is supposedly more stable than Arch, but I’ve had no problems with Arch on my laptop. Granted I’ve only had that for four months or so.
Wow an expectation of future vague performance improvements is exciting indeed!
Vulkan developers said last year that this is the single biggest bottleneck on Nvidia cards that they are aware of. Of course, the final performance improvement can only be known once it is properly implemented, but their guestimation is that it should bring the performance much closer to Windows performance.
I already get better frame rates on Linux than I did on Windows. But I won't complain about more of them
I don't buy hardware from companies that are hostile to open source.
Well, they seem to be loosening up on that.
Lol, let me know when they add back support for GTX 1000 series cards. XD
Amen to that brother 🙏
My 1070 ti is chugging on strong 🤟😎
I built a new machine with a free 1070-ti in it like a month ago, was a big upgrade for me.
Already moved to AMD.
Has anyone been able to get HDR working in Kubuntu 25.10 without the system crashing entirely?
Have you tried moving to a newer kernel? It should be working with Nvidia latest and KDE latest (Mine is solid on CachyOS) so it could be a kernel bug for you. No real downside to installing a newer one; but depending on your setup there could be a few regressions that might force you back to stable.
No real downside to installing a newer one; but depending on your setup there could be a few regressions that might force you back to stable.
So there are no real downsides except for potentially that it won't work and will waste a whole bunch of time and you'll have to revert.
Yep. No downsides.
That's literally how any update on a computer ever will work. Real downsides worth mentioning would be like "you'll be unbootable, you can't rollback, it'll update a bunch of other packages, it might delete user home". Having to select an old entry in your grub config at boot because the new kernel doesn't play nice with any number of custom peripherals or packages on your system is not what I would consider a serious downside and you'd have to do it if Kubuntu decided to roll a kernel update anyway. Do you uh, use linux?
KDE on endeavouros works with HDR for me (latest drivers). Ubuntu is usually a few months behind on updates, but I wouldn't expect plasma 6 to crash every time when trying HDR. I hope you're able to narrow down the cause, or have a magical update that fixes it.
It's not just Plasma I think. I can't even ctrl-alt-fkey into a terminal. The whole system freezes.
HDR improvements are coming in some later driver version.
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/vulkan-extensions-needed-for-hdr-is-missing/334268/14?u=tda0626
So the answer is shrug with a side of "thoughts and prayers!"
No one should buy a product on a promise of future functionality. The answer is a clear "no" as of now.
I agree on that, but Nvidia GPU are by far the most common GPUs among gamers. Some of them might be excited to hear that their HDR woes are getting fixed at some point, possibly in near-ish future. Some people in that forum thread are saying that the HDR extensions are actually already included in the driver, even though the Nvidia guy said otherwise.
It currently works for me on Ubuntu with Gnome and current drivers, so it's not (just) NVidia. I do notice HDR mode is slightly more dim on my screen though, so I turned it off. It'll be nice to see improvements.
How can anyone get excited over GPUs in 2026?
Like, what are you looking forward to at this point? Just enjoy what you have...
This is not a new GPU but a driver, so the GPU you have gives you more performance. But yeah buying a new GPU is crazy right now. Maybe used amd cards are still affordable.
Is... is it as exciting as their most recent Windows driver?
Not upgrading. The last two on Windows apparently had lots of bugs
exciting one? like full of bugs and crashing constantly?