So Arch just moved to NVIDIA 590 and dropped Pascal support. I’m running an older Predator laptop with a GTX 1070 (Pascal) + Intel iGPU. After the update, NVIDIA is basically gone, but Intel fallback still gives me a working desktop.
This machine was always a fallback gaming laptop, not my primary system, but I’d still like to make reasonable use of it.
My current situation: Arch Linux with KDE Plasma, Intel graphics works fine, NVIDIA 1070 is unusable unless I go legacy, Wayland currently working only because I’m on Intel.
From what I understand: NVIDIA legacy (580xx) = X11 only, Wayland + Pascal is basically dead.
Arch will keep moving kernels, so legacy drivers mean ongoing maintenance...
(picture related).
What I’m trying to decide:
Stick with Arch, install legacy NVIDIA, switch to X11, accept maintenance?
Ditch NVIDIA entirely, run Intel + Wayland, and treat the 1070 as dead weight?
Switch to a slower-moving distro (Debian?) just to keep X11 + NVIDIA working longer?
Or is there a better hybrid setup people are actually happy with?
I’m not looking to resurrect Pascal forever, just trying to choose the least stupid path for a secondary machine without fighting my system every update.
Curious what others with GTX 10xx laptops are actually doing in practice.
Oh thanks for the heads up. First time I hear about NVIDIA dropping Linux support for older cards. I would have liked to say that they lost me as a customer for this, but it doesn't look like NVIDIA cares about selling to consumers these days anyway (also due to the lack of an open source driver I had already made up my mind not to get another NVIDIA card long before this).
Guess it's gonna be an AMD or Intel card next time. Any recommendations for a card that fits into a small ITX build?
This happens every few years. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has the nvidia drivers split into generations for this reason. I think they're up to G06 by now. Guess they will add G07 now.
AMD cards have support directly in the Kernel, its usually plug and play. You just have to be careful about brand new cards (ie: released very recently) to ensure your distribution of choice has a new enough kernel and mesa.