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…
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.
But yeah, I agree, if package maintainers were astute there, a warning would’ve probably been good somehow. Not sure pacman supports pre-install warnings. Maybe? It does support warning about installing a renamed/moved package. But the naming would’ve had to be really weird for everyone involved if the warning would be clear in that case.
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.
TIL Arch is a footgun. 🤡 cope. 😉
But yeah, I agree, if package maintainers were astute there, a warning would’ve probably been good somehow. Not sure pacman supports pre-install warnings. Maybe? It does support warning about installing a renamed/moved package. But the naming would’ve had to be really weird for everyone involved if the warning would be clear in that case.
I admit, all distros are a different degree of footguns, I’m saying this as a nix user. lol
Just as with anything you do in life, take action with a healthy side of precaution.
This is a life lesson. I’ve learned to be careful around the oven. I’ve also learned to be careful running volatile commands. 😅
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.
Okay. Kind of a matter of definition of “breaking” but sure.
Right. But on Linux they happen automatically when upgrading the rest of your system, is what I was saying.