So you want to take advantage of your GPU to do some local LLM stuff or some brute force cracking, but you're a man of culture. You're on Linux, and you've already installed Nvidia proprietary drivers so that you can do hardware encoding and other stuff like that.

So when you go to the website and follow their install instructions, you run a bunch of commands they provide, execute some bullshit, and in the middle of the install it crashes, dependencies are conflicting, you can't --fix-broken, you need to purge everything (even though you already did following their bad instructions).

FUCK!

FUCK YOU NVIDIA!

Purge again I guess. Maybe you need a more aggressive strategy?

Found here and here:

dpkg -l | grep nvidia | awk '{print $2}' \
  | xargs sudo dpkg --force-all -P

sudo apt --fix-broken install

sudo apt remove --autoremove --purge \
  "*cuda*" "*cublas*" "*cufft*" "*cufile*" \
  "*curand*" "*cusolver*" "*cusparse*" "*gds-tools*" \
  "*npp*" "*nvjpeg*" "nsight*" "*nvvm*" "*nvptx*"

NOW WHATEVER YOU DO

DO NOT TYPE THIS COMMAND

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

 sudo ubuntu-drivers | grep autoinstall
  autoinstall  Deprecated, please use "install" instead

because

if you do it is going to install a new kernel and build some kernel modules and after you reboot your display, network, and audio drivers will all be fucked and you'll have to load up GRUB and boot an older kernel and come back in and purge the Nvidia and CUDA stuff (again).

Use the Install Nvidia Drivers (Ubuntu Docs) guide instead (if you're on Ubuntu). Look at the log file as per that guide, get the correct version.

sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:580

Nvidia will not be able to get it right for you. By the grace of God alone will touching anything from Nvidia spare your computer.

nvidia-smi
Thu Feb  5 23:06:43 2026       
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.126.09         Driver Version: 580.126.09     CUDA Version: 13.0     |
+-------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

So that's awesome, however...

hashcat -I
hashcat (v6.2.6) starting in backend information mode

Successfully initialized the NVIDIA main driver CUDA runtime library.

Failed to initialize NVIDIA RTC library.

* Device #1: CUDA SDK Toolkit not installed or incorrectly installed.
             CUDA SDK Toolkit required for proper device support and utilization.
             Falling back to OpenCL runtime.

We are full circle back to this guide

NOW WHATEVER YOU DO

DO NOT USE THIS NVIDIA INSTALLER OR THIS GUIDE

We're going to try something provided by the Linux distribution, which you should also do on your end.

sudo apt install nvidia-cuda-toolkit

Let us pray...

hashcat -I
hashcat (v6.2.6) starting in backend information mode

CUDA Info:
==========

CUDA.Version.: 13.0

Backend Device ID #1 (Alias: #2)
  Name...........: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
  Processor(s)...: 10
  Clock..........: 1784
  Memory.Total...: 6057 MB
  Memory.Free....: 5624 MB
  Local.Memory...: 48 KB
  PCI.Addr.BDFe..: 0000:26:00.0

OpenCL Info:
============

OpenCL Platform ID #1
  Vendor..: NVIDIA Corporation
  Name....: NVIDIA CUDA
  Version.: OpenCL 3.0 CUDA 13.0.97

  Backend Device ID #2 (Alias: #1)
    Type...........: GPU
    Vendor.ID......: 32
    Vendor.........: NVIDIA Corporation
    Name...........: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
    Version........: OpenCL 3.0 CUDA
    Processor(s)...: 10
    Clock..........: 1784
    Memory.Total...: 6057 MB (limited to 1514 MB allocatable in one block)
    Memory.Free....: 5568 MB
    Local.Memory...: 48 KB
    OpenCL.Version.: OpenCL C 1.2 
    Driver.Version.: 580.126.09
    PCI.Addr.BDF...: 26:00.0