hardware/drivers management on mint/debian?

[hd66]

hello

i have a laptop whom is nvidia GPU, and the thing is, when i suspend it, either it freeze before suspend, or just by waking up.
thus screen, kb etc are totally unusable.
i'd like to fix it but for me, as my aptitude package managers says, i have "nouveau" reversed-engineered-oss driver, instead of proprietary one.
why not.
i saw here on that forum, that downgrading to another GPU driver could solve it :
viewtopic.php?p=1958919#p1958919


problem, it's very difficult to :
-identify which driver is needed for which card (why there is no "all-amd/nvidia/intel" universal package ?)
-change it then try it then revert back to it..

thank you for helping!

[axisofevil]

Depends on your nvidia card
nouveau is excellent for lowish-end cards - its been good for my NVIDIA GP108 [GeForce GT 1030] !
High-end gaming cards need OEM drivers for best performance.
But currently 835 drivers have problems with latest kernel and 825-series downgrade for nvidia drivers does get [currently] recommended.

Try running inxi -Gxx for GPU information.

[MiZoG]

Post your system specs (at least the output of inxi -Ga) because some things written here might be pointless.
How can we help with gpu drivers when we don't know the exact model of your gpu?

You misinterpret that link, hd66.
You cannot downgrade nouveau. You can simply replace it with the proprietary driver.
You hardware could be potentially supported by different, older or newer, builds of the proprietary driver indeed.

problem, it's very difficult to :
-identify which driver is needed for which card (why there is no "all-amd/nvidia/intel" universal package ?)
-change it then try it then revert back to it..

1. You are actually using something like a "universal package". It is called mesa and includes drivers for amd, intel and nvidia.
But it is an open source driver stack. Nvidia only lately started to distribute an open-source incomplete experimental driver for their GPUs on Linux which is not ready to use.
2. You can "revert" to a driver only with proprietary nvidia.

The problem is there is no gui app in LMDE like "Driver Manager" in the main edition of LM which is based on Ubuntu tools.
A user in another thread found nvidia-driver in Software Manager in LMDE and installed the proprietary driver this way which sounds easy-peasy.
Otherwise open a terminal and run sudo apt install nvidia-driver
But this will work if your hardware is still supported by the nvidia proprietary driver.

@axisofevil: I really doubt that nouveau is "good" for any nvidia card (gt 1030 included).
It is more or less better than nothing.

[axisofevil]

For someone who mainly uses their low-end GPU for HD video or web browsing etc nouveau is perfectly good.
Some years ago, I tried a nvidia driver and found zero difference except that kernel upgrades were a little bit nightmarish.

Whilst the upgrade thing has since been solved, nouveau has also been improved