It’s no surprise that NVIDIA is gradually dropping support for older videocards, with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed. What’s more surprising is the terrible way t…
Sorta, but you run one command to update everything at once, and even though the system knows what GPU you have it still seems to update the driver to one thats not compatible, instead of holding that update back.
Also if it didn’t warn the user when updating, the user had no idea they were pulling any trigger, especially when Linux falls back to CLI after this instead of just falling back to a basic driver.
Not sure if you’re on Windows or Linux but, on Linux, we have to actively take explicit actions not to upgrade something when we are upgrading the rest of our system. It takes more or less significant effort to prevent upgrading a specific package, especially when it comes in a sneaky way like this that is hard to judge by the version number alone.
On Windows you’d be in a situation like “oh, I forgot to update the drivers for three years, well that was lucky.”
It makes me wonder why the package still auto updates if it detects you’re using the driver that would be removed, surely it could do some checks first?
Would be vastly preferable to it just breaking the system.
I believe the same SW version is packaged. Nvidia said they’d drop support in the 580 release, but they shifted it to 590 now.
The arch issues are another layer of headache by the maintainers changing the package names and people breaking their systems on update when a non-compatible version is pulled replacing the one with still pascal support in it.
Not really a problem of Arch, but of the driver release model, then, IMO. You’d have this issue on Windows too if you just upgraded blindly, right? It’s Nvidia’s fault for not naming their drivers, or versioning/naming them in a way that indicates support for a set of architectures. Not just an incrementing number willy nilly.
Are they supported longer on the windows driver?
Windows doesn’t force update your driver and remove support though, and even if it did it won’t drop you to some CLI, it will still work.
Rolling distros also only update when you tell them. It is the user who is pulling the trigger on the footgun in both cases.
I’d say the main difference is that arch users are more trigger-happy about being up to date.
Also, I think pacman should at least warn you if the problem is enough to warrant a post on the arch website.
Sorta, but you run one command to update everything at once, and even though the system knows what GPU you have it still seems to update the driver to one thats not compatible, instead of holding that update back.
Also if it didn’t warn the user when updating, the user had no idea they were pulling any trigger, especially when Linux falls back to CLI after this instead of just falling back to a basic driver.
What you described is what happaned with arch. The transitioning shouldn’t have happened this way, IMO.
Other distros usually don’t send their users to TTY after an update if they can help it.
On the long term, the situation is the same on linux and windows: you choose the latest driver and live with that given feature set and its bugs.
Apparently? Title only mentions dropping the support on Linux. 🤷♂️
You don’t have to updare your drivers though, isn’t this normal with older hardware?
Not sure if you’re on Windows or Linux but, on Linux, we have to actively take explicit actions not to upgrade something when we are upgrading the rest of our system. It takes more or less significant effort to prevent upgrading a specific package, especially when it comes in a sneaky way like this that is hard to judge by the version number alone.
On Windows you’d be in a situation like “oh, I forgot to update the drivers for three years, well that was lucky.”
It makes me wonder why the package still auto updates if it detects you’re using the driver that would be removed, surely it could do some checks first?
Would be vastly preferable to it just breaking the system.
I believe the same SW version is packaged. Nvidia said they’d drop support in the 580 release, but they shifted it to 590 now.
The arch issues are another layer of headache by the maintainers changing the package names and people breaking their systems on update when a non-compatible version is pulled replacing the one with still pascal support in it.
Not really a problem of Arch, but of the driver release model, then, IMO. You’d have this issue on Windows too if you just upgraded blindly, right? It’s Nvidia’s fault for not naming their drivers, or versioning/naming them in a way that indicates support for a set of architectures. Not just an incrementing number willy nilly.
It’s 2025, can we not display a warning message in pacman? Or letting it switch from nvidia-590 to nvidia-legacy?
I’m not an arch user, I admit, I don’t like footguns.
Windows doesnt drop to CLI and break if the graphics driver is missing. But also GPU driver updates are not forced on you just by updating the system.