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.
One option that you could also consider is switching to CachyOS. It seems that they're handling support for these legacy GPUs in a much nicer way: https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/announcement-maintenance-notice-nvidia-driver-restructuring-580xx-590xx/20010
No need to reinstall the entire os, just swap the driver packages...
Sure, I'd consider that the main option (and it had already been proposed by multiple people here). But, it also seems like that would come with quite a bit of additional hassle, as discussed below. I've personally had some quite annoying issues with incompatible DKMS modules... So, instead of using the unsupported AUR option, it might also be worth considering switching to a very similar distro that actually still supports this hardware configuration.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't cachyos deploying the exact same solution? The only difference seems to be that their package manager offers to swap the packages.
I don't know if there are any differences between the two packages. But, the CachyOS version is part of their official repositories and doesn't depend on the AUR. I don't know if that would have any implications regarding how often you need to rebuild the module.