Almost dumb question about nvidia drivers

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1

I have a laptop with an nvidia 4060 video card. I’m currently running:

$ nvidia-smi 
Sun Jun  1 09:52:22 2025       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.144                Driver Version: 570.144        CUDA Version: 12.8     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 ...    On  |   00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   47C    P8              5W /   55W |     530MiB /   8188MiB |      4%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A            1469      G   /usr/bin/Xorg.bin                       329MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            1786      G   xfwm4                                     3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A          190110      G   /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox              141MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Since my video card is not changing, do I need to upgrade the drivers and having to deal with the potential driver upgrade problems?
or
just do a zypper addlock on the nvidia?

Thanks

2

Driver updates contain security fixes. By locking the driver you make your system vulnerable.

3

@elfroggio there is a later one… 570.153.02 open or proprietary pity you run X11 as not really taking advantage of the Nvidia power to use both graphic and compute…

For example on GNOME here with the open driver and cuda installed via the run file…

 nvidia-smi
Sun Jun  1 12:22:31 2025       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 575.57.08              Driver Version: 575.57.08      CUDA Version: 12.9     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  Quadro RTX 4000                On  |   00000000:06:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| 30%   35C    P8              9W /  125W |     125MiB /   8192MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A            2339      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                      2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3463    C+G   ptyxis                                   38MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A           42500    C+G   /usr/bin/nautilus                        41MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A           42659    C+G   /usr/bin/gnome-text-editor               37MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
4

Sorry, I don’t think that I understand what you are pointing me to.

I use tumbleweed + xfce under x11.

Are you saying that if I switch to wayland (could be be gnome or kde) I could switch to nouveau?
Can it run ollama?

I don’t like gnome but I could switch kde if the nvidia stuff was simplified.

Thanks

5

@elfroggio there is 570.153.02 in the rpm repositories, you should upgrade from 570.144.

Well that’s your call, X11 is on it’s way out in the future and no ongoing development, is XFCE working on a Wayland version (I imagine so)?

6

They are. I haven’t a clue about when it will be released, but it already exists in the upstream project

1 Like
7

done

 $ nvidia-smi
Sun Jun  1 17:49:19 2025       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.153.02             Driver Version: 570.153.02     CUDA Version: 12.8     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 ...    On  |   00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   51C    P8              6W /   55W |     487MiB /   8188MiB |      3%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
1 Like
8

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