

TLDR: Yes, it matters. Especially when it comes to inference and “new” features and hacks it relies on.
What GPU and what inference engine are you using?
On Debian I would use the stable version (not old stable) and I would enable nonfree firmware and also the backports version of the kernel and nonfree firmware. Then you’re probably set for a year or two.
An old kernel with only free firmware likely performs much worse. Look at the release logs of the Linux kernel and any GPU driver.
If your hardware is very old, it probably doesn’t matter super much. But sometimes it does (like when a manufacturer decides to unlock some sleeping feature in an old forgotten device).
Oh, that’s quite fancy hardware.
Hmm… Unless exllama is explicitly recommended by NVIDIA for that particular GPU and setup, it seems “risky”. vLLM seems to be the popular choice for most “production” systems. I’m switching from llama.cpp to vLLM because of better performance and its the engine recommended by most model providers. I don’t really have the time to benchmark, so I’ll just do what the documentation says. And it’s really hard to do good benchmarks. Especially when “qualitative language performance” can vary for the same weights on different hardware/software.
With that kind of hardware, I would do exactly what NVIDIA and your model provider(s) say. Otherwise you might waste a lot of GPU power.