Yeah, in that case you're going to need to reinstall. The problem isn't the drivers or the kernel; it's everything else that the new Firefox depends on.

Absolutely not true. Kernel had a framebuffer scrollback buffer since before I started using it more than two decades ago. It was discarded in kernel 5.11 because it had no maintainer. Lack of maintainer has been responsible for loss of various drivers for old hardware too.

It may be needed initially, but to make it "permanent" is to "permanently" cripple graphics performance. It's intended as a workaround and troubleshooting device, not intended to produce anything like expected behavior. For one thing, it can't support more than one display at a time, and typically, resolution is limited to 1024x768, or worse.

On the contrary, using FOSS drivers you can expect performance in the same general class as users of AMD and Intel GPUs enjoy from using FOSS drivers. I have NVidia GPUs older and newer than your 550 keeping me content using only FOSS.

2 members found this post helpful.

is there a website for these FOSS drivers ?

vinifera,

All is not lost!

There is some good news, so don’t get too downhearted.

Nvidia Legacy drivers:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/

Your graphics card is Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti with Device PCI ID: 1244.

The 390.xxx driver supports your GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

There are two suitable candidates:

1. The one I mentioned previously, (390.157) dated 2022.11.22:

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driv.../196213/en-us/

and also the slightly earlier version

2. (390.151) dated 2022.5.16:
https://www.nvidia.com/download/driv.../188601/en-us/

The second one (390.151) has a patch available which will make it work with more recent Linux kernels (5.18+), as per the following link.

Patched legacy nVIDIA drivers to work with newer Linux kernels:
https://github.com/MeowIce/nvidia-legacy

Note:
This repository includes patched legacy nVIDIA drivers for newer Linux kernels (5.8 - 6.5). It works on all Linux distros.

I would be inclined to visit the “Patched” link above, click on Code > click on Download ZIP and then copy the “nvidia-legacy-main.zip” file to somewhere safe for future use.

Also, download and save both drivers 390.151 and 390.157.

Linux Mint 21.2 Xfce uses kernel 5.15, so you could just use driver 390.157 and forget about patching for the time being.

I hope you find this information useful.

1 members found this post helpful.

Most distros are made entirely or almost entirely of FOSS. Thus, they are part of standard repos. This primer provides more detail about graphics drivers.

vinifera,

Just to add that one of my laptops is a Lenovo T440s with Nvidia GeForce GT 730M.

I installed Linux Mint 21.2 MATE recently and it booted up perfectly with no black screen.

After doing the various updates, the Driver Manager opened automatically and presented me with 3 options for the driver, including two for Nvidia, one of which was marked “Recommended” (see attached screenshot).

Once it was selected and installed, I rebooted the laptop and all was well.

Again, there was no black screen and no need to use nomodeset, much to mrmazda’s relief!

Happy installation of Linux Mint 21.2 Xfce.

Attached Thumbnails

 

1 members found this post helpful.

Devices with FOSS drivers are usually supported for a much longer time period that with windows. M$ has a vested interest in forcing users to upgrade and hardware vendors the same. The fact we can continue to use hardware for a much longer time period than with other OSes (mac or windows) is a plus to using linux.

1 members found this post helpful.

ohh now i got small relief :S
hopefully it will stay like this lol