Dear all,
Since a few days now I can no longer get my debian buster installation to load any kind of graphical interface. Historically I mostly used Ubuntu to run research software packages for transcriptomic analyses and therefore I need nvidia drivers and CUDA toolkit. At some point i decided to give Debian a try and everything was running OK, even after I had accidentally installed the newest nvidia 455 driver (bundled with cuda 11). Everything was working fine until a few days ago when I was greeted with the CLI after boot. The error messages were revolving around nvidia-persistenced service, nv module issues and /dev/nvidia not being there (and it isn't). What happened?
I tried reconfiguring Display server and display manager (which helped me once) but that had no effect. Removing cuda toolkit and nvidia driver allowed me to boot back to GUI. Tried installing 450 driver from backports, and that crashed it again. Purged nvidia driver again, could boot into GUI and installed 418 driver from debian repo - again CLI at boot. I've been navigating numerous forums online searching for the solution but couldn't find anything that would help. I am annoyed that the installation from the repo (418 driver) also fails me, I don't understand what the problem is.
I am not really a Linux expert (although we were getting along very well) and this problem massively drained my energy and wasted time.
Can someone point me in the right direction to solve this problem? Or should I give up on Debian all together?
Appreciate any feedback I can get.
Best,
Vinko