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.
I’m not as familiar with the aur as I am with apt and now dnf, is there a function to keep it from automatically installing something newer? That’s why I meant when I referred to pinning.
So the package is a specific driver version, which will keep you on the 580 diver version through updates. This package would be installed to provide the drivers and requires the matched utils package.
You would install this, rather than just installing the meta-package from the official repositories. As shown in the AUR page:
This is also a DKMS package. This will let it build against whatever kernel you're running, so you can keep using the module through regular system qns kernel upgrades.
So, the idea would be, remove the nvidia drivers you have, install this one, and it'll be like the upgrade and support drop never happened. You won't get driver upgrades, but you wouldn't anyway. It's the mostly safe way to version pin the package without actually pinning it in pacman. That would count as a partial upgrade, which is unsupported
Thanks for the informative and detailed answer! I’ve only ever installed and used arch for fun so the finer points of how pacman handles manually installed packages never came up.
You said mostly safe, what kinds of issues can doing what you just described cause? You said pinning it through pacman would be an unsupported partial upgrade, even though that would give the package manager visibility on what you’re trying to do it would result in types of dependency resolution that aren’t supported or tested for I imagine?
You can add a package to your ignore list, although that is not recommended for the longer term.
Yeah I didn’t want to make the bold and refreshing assertion that arch isnt appropriate for situations where gracefully handling an old package is a requirement but that was my initial read on the situation.