Bug#1079569: nvidia-open-kernel-dkms: Bricked my laptop. Missing instructions?

[Marc Glisse]

On Sun, 15 Jun 2025, Andreas Beckmann wrote:

> Where would you have expected documentation about this additional step 
> needed?

The instructions at https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers may have 
improved since last year, but they do not seem to mention update-glx at 
all (there is just one mention of glx-alternative-nvidia in the context of 
nouveau).

Maybe they could also warn about the danger of having a -support package 
installed without the corresponding driver (especially if the dpkg 
alternative happens to point to that one), which can easily happen when 
removing one flavor of the driver.

(I had also looked in /usr/share/doc/nvidia-open-kernel-dkms and 
/usr/share/doc/nvidia-open-kernel-support but there was no README.Debian)

Maybe installing one flavor of the driver could print a very visible 
message advertising update-glx if the new flavor is not the selected 
alternative?

I don't know if the boot scripts could fail more gracefully if they think 
they should load one flavor of the driver but that is not present on the 
system.

It would have been nice if removing the driver had automatically switched 
the alternative choice somehow, possibly by automatically removing the 
-support package, but the current behavior seems to be by design so people 
can install the driver manually and still use the -support package.

(those are random suggestions to see if one makes sense to you...)

-- 
Marc Glisse