Nvidia 555 Beta released

Nvidia 555.42.02 Beta released with explicit sync support today!

Will it be rolled out throughout uBlue *-nvidia images in the coming week or two, or does uBlue stick to Stable release branches?

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It would be nice to have the new driver in Bazzite.
If not, is it possible to install the new driver on top of the existing one somehow?

Any news on this? It would be nice to test the new driver in Bazzite.

Thx!

p5 said on the bluefin GitHub:

We will be shipping Nvidia 555 once the stable driver has been released and is being packaged by RPMFusion. We believe it’s too risky to ship a beta driver since Bluefin is meant to be a reliable desktop experience, and there have already been complaints about the desktop experience using the new driver from users on other distros.

So while I don’t know about Bazzite, Bluefin probably isn’t getting a new Nvidia driver until at least the 560 driver is out because it’ll be a stable release.

Disappointed tbh… when aren’t people having issues with the nvidia driver? Its not exactly a reason to delay all the explicit sync fixes - that would at least allow me to game without seizure-levels of flickering and frame-pace issues!

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Is there any workaround for installing 555 on Bazzite? Thanks!

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I’m cautiously optimistic that the 555 series is going to have a non-beta release (soon :tm:) once the kinks are worked out, but my memory about how the versioning works there is pretty shaky.

Historically, the main Universal Blue NVIDIA images (which were focused on just being slightly above upstream vs the tailored Bazzie/Bluefin images) released a specific tag you could rebase to not long after the drivers hit stable.

Honestly things are fine… in X11. I’m reasonably impatient and want Wayland to be working well also, but having bleeding edge BETA drivers isn’t really the point of uBlue as far as I’m aware.

The general ethos that I picked up on when I hopped in a bit over a year ago was that the goal was a relatively stable system that “just works” and you don’t have to worry about updates, things will just improve over time.

It’d be nice to have a tag to rebase to for beta drivers, but if I wanted to tweak with the internals of my system on a daily basis I’d still be using Arch or Gentoo.

There’s a lot of decent tooling around custom images (and it’s getting better!), but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wait for stable hardware drivers rather than chase bugs on beta drivers.

Yeah, I’ve used Bluefin now for 6~ months, and had previously rolled my own startingpoint image for a while, but found it wasn’t really worth the hassle with how much that whole pipeline seemed to be in flux at the time.

I’d really like a rawhide tag to accompany the gts/latest ones, but I think I’m probably looking for something more bleeding edge (or possibly stabbing victim tier?) than uBlue’s leading-edge/GrandTouring target, and I’m probably just going to return to Arch at some point soon and incorporate the parts of uBlue that I like into that, like the background updates and just.

Yeah since we slipstream what rpmfusion and other repos provide we’re locked to their release cadence. To use an analogy, we’re the delivery folks, not the packaging plant.

We did offer multiple Nvidia driver streams but over time the only thing available to us was the latest driver so we dropped that since they wouldn’t even build. It’s the same reason we can’t provide a rawhide image, it’d barely ever build.

There’s really not much we can do other than encourage more people to go help out rpmfusion/negativo.

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@iotku I’m looking at a list of Linux x64 NVIDIA drivers and their versions from October 2023 through now (20 of them). Three beta drivers are shown; 2 from the 555 series and 1 from the 550 series. There are plenty of release versions from both xx0 and xx5.

All that to say, it looks like you’re right that the 555 series should eventually have a non-beta release.

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