🚀 First Contact: Debian 13 Installation
Today I installed Debian 13 (Trixie) on my trusty Lenovo P15 Gen 2, and to my
pleasant surprise, the entire setup went through without a single hiccup. After the installer finished,
the system booted straight into a clean and crisp GNOME environment—no drama, no missing drivers,
no blinking error lights. Just pure Debian goodness.
🎮 NVIDIA Drivers: Cooler Temps or Wishful Thinking?
After the base system was running, I added the official NVIDIA drivers for the
RTX A2000. Whether it’s placebo or real science, the laptop feels a bit cooler now.
Maybe improved power management, maybe nerd optimism—time will tell. But so far, no fan screaming, no graphical
glitches, and everything runs silky smooth.
For reference, this model comes with:
- 16 GB RAM (factory) but upgraded to 64 GB
- 512 GB NVMe SSD (Opal Encryption 2)
- Two additional 2 TB NVMe M.2 SSDs configured as RAID 1 (mirroring)
- 15.6″ Full HD IPS display (1920×1080)
- RTX A2000 + Intel UHD Graphics hybrid setup
- Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth
🖥️ Hardware Support: Classic Lenovo Reliability
As expected from Lenovo, the Linux compatibility is outstanding. Even without tweaking, most components
were recognized immediately. Here’s what I’ve tested so far:
- Graphics – NVIDIA & Intel both functional
- Sound – works out of the box
- LAN & Wi-Fi – fully operational
- Bluetooth – detected and usable
Still on my to-test list: fingerprint sensor, WWAN (4G modem), and some edge-case power management scenarios.
💻 The P15 Gen 2: Heavy, But Still a Beast
Although my P15 Gen 2 is now just past its warranty window, it continues to punch well above its weight
class—both metaphorically and literally. It’s thick, it’s heavy, and you won’t exactly enjoy carrying it around,
but performance-wise it still feels like a mobile workstation meant to last.
With 64 GB RAM and RAID 1 storage, it’s more than capable of replacing a desktop workstation for many workloads.
Debian 13 complements this hardware beautifully.
🔧 What’s Next?
I’ll keep exploring the system over the next two weeks—running workloads, testing the remaining hardware,
and watching how well Trixie behaves on this beast. I’ll share a detailed update in about
14 days.
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On my desktop PC with a newer NVIDIA GPU (a GeForce RTX 5050), the installation of Debian 13 did not go as smoothly as I had hoped.
After the base system was up, I ran nvidia-detect and got the following output:
root@ryzen:~# nvidia-detect
Detected NVIDIA GPUs:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GB207 [GeForce RTX 5050] [10de:2d83] (rev a1)
Checking card: NVIDIA Corporation GB207 [GeForce RTX 5050] (rev a1)
Uh oh. Your card is not supported by any driver version up to 550.163.01.
A newer driver may add support for your card.
Newer driver releases may be available in backports, unstable or experimental.
So basically: my GPU is too new for the driver stack that ships with Debian 13. The tool explicitly says that no driver up to
550.163.01 supports this card, and hints that newer releases might only be available via backports, unstable, or experimental.
Backports: Tried it, still no luck
I did try to go the “Debian way” and pull newer NVIDIA packages from backports, but that still didn’t solve the problem.
The card simply isn’t supported yet by what Debian currently provides, even with the newer packages enabled.
This is exactly where you run into the classic Debian trade-off:
rock-solid, conservative packages on the one hand vs. support for very fresh, bleeding-edge hardware on the other.
For servers and stable workstations that’s usually perfect — but with a brand-new consumer GPU it can turn into a blocker.
Quick workaround: Switch to Ubuntu on the desktop
Because I wanted this desktop machine to “just work” with my RTX 5050 (including GNOME and hardware acceleration),
I decided to stop fighting the driver situation on Debian 13 and instead installed the latest Ubuntu release.
Result: the installer, proprietary NVIDIA driver and GNOME all worked out of the box without any extra tweaking.
For this specific hardware combo, Ubuntu currently feels much more “plug & play” than Debian 13.
Takeaway
If you’re running very new NVIDIA hardware on a desktop system and want minimal hassle, it might be worth considering a distro with
a fresher kernel and driver stack (like Ubuntu or other more fast-moving desktop-focused distributions).
Debian 13 is still great — but right now it’s just not the most convenient choice for a desktop with a brand-new RTX card.