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.

  • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
    10·
    6 hours ago

    ?

    The 580 driver does support wayland, it’s not that old. Or are you worried about future breaking changes since you won’t get updates?

    I just switched my sisters old laptop with a 970m over to the nvidia-580xx driver, available on the AUR. Further manual maintenance should be unnecessary until the kernel becomes too new for that.

    I even had to enable wayland for GDM because it was trying to use X11 and failing.

    She plays minecraft and a couple other games so the nouveau was not an option.

  • fragrantvegetable@sopuli.xyz
    5·
    6 hours ago

    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?

  • Vitaly@feddit.uk
    10·
    9 hours ago

    Using open source drivers that are already in the kernel would be your best bet

  • doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml
    10·
    13 hours ago

    If arch doesn’t have version pinning then switch to a distribution that does.

    Debian has version pinning, nvidia runs a third party repository and it has a pinning package you can install to get and stay with the 580 branch.

      • doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml
        2·
        4 hours ago

        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.

        • med@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          1 hour ago

          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:

          Conflicts:	nvidia, NVIDIA-MODULE, nvidia-open-dkms
Provides:	nvidia, NVIDIA-MODULE

          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

          • doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml
            2·
            3 hours ago

            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.

  • SOULFLY98@slrpnk.net
    151·
    15 hours ago

    Unfortunately, even Debian stable will eventually roll to 590 sometime over its lifecycle.

    Either disable the NVIDIA GPU and stick with Intel only, or switch to FreeBSD. It has very good support for old NVIDIA drivers thanks to architectural decisions that were made 25+ years ago.

    Maybe eventually the open source “nova” driver will save those of us who want to stay on Linux.

    • Sir_Premiumhengst@lemmy.worldOP
      8·
      14 hours ago

      But are we talking a couple of years or a couple of months till Debian rolls to 590?

      How is steam on FreeBSD these days? Main use for this laptop would be playing “old” games like DarkSouls.

  • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    8·
    14 hours ago

    Debian by default uses the Nouveau open source driver for Nvidia GPUs and that driver does support Pascal. Debian installations will continue to work just fine even without Nvidia’s development support.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software)

    I don’t know if that’s something that can be done on Arch but in theory you can test the fallback Intel driver vs Nouveau and see which fallback you prefer.

    Nouveau works well for day-to-day use and works with Wayland. I’m not a hardcore gamer but have played low-mid range Steam games without issue. I suspect it may not do well playing high end AAA games but then again if you’re rocking a Pascal era GPU it’s unlikely you’ve been playing those type of games anyway.

    EDIT: Just to add, pretty sure the built in Intel iGPU on your laptop is more power efficient vs the Nvidia GPU so it may be worthwhile to disable the Nvidia GPU entirely rather than worrying about software drivers.

    • Sir_Premiumhengst@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      5 hours ago

      R/n I have the card just deactivated. Not looking to play AAA games but using this laptop as a “player 2” for Minecraft multiplayer.

      It’s just thst deactivating the card and calling it dead silicon seems a tad sad…

        • Sir_Premiumhengst@lemmy.worldOP
          33·
          14 hours ago

          Maybe I don’t understand. Here’s what I got form the news. I can install nvidia-580xx-dkms from AUR but it needs be build for my kernel. So everytime I run pacman -Syu I risk a kernel update thst needs me to manually rebuild dkms. Right? Feels like anxiety before each update…

          Relatively new to this. Probably missing things I haven’t heard of.

          • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            33·
            13 hours ago

            It will compile and install the module for you. All it means is that whenever your kernel is updated, the install process will take around 5 minutes longer than it otherwise would whilst it compiles the dkms module for you.

            If you use the lts kernel package, your kernel updates will be infrequent.

            If you use the regular arch linux kernel package, it will update every few weeks like it does now, and each time, your package installation process will run a few minutes longer due to the need to compile the driver

      • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
        6·
        14 hours ago

        Unless Arch’s lts kernel switches to a newer lts (in a year or two?), you can run nvidia 580 dkms modules and the lts kernel with basically no maintenance.

        After that, you can consider something like linux-lts66 from AUR, or switch to another distro if desired. The first option requires compiling the kernel (no maintenance, just processor time), and will keep your system security patched until the last LTS kernel supported by nvidia 580 modules stops being supported.

        Whatever kernel you choose, ensure you have the -headers, like linux-lts-headers. That way, the nvidia-580xx-dkms package can install properly.

        If you haven’t yet, look into an AUR helper like yay or paru. These significantly improve quality of life when using AUR packages.

        • Sir_Premiumhengst@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          14 hours ago

          Thank you for a nuanced answer. I start understanding.

          For people who’ve gone the linux-lts66 (or similar) route from AUR: is that something you’d consider “set and forget,” or does it eventually turn into a kind of babysitting?

          • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
            2·
            13 hours ago

            As long as you use an AUR helper to update your system (replace pacman -Syu with yay -Syu), and keep the kernel EOLs in your calendar, it shouldn’t be constant babysitting. Updating a (non -bin) kernel from the AUR requires compiling the kernel, which makes updates take way longer, but doesn’t require extra manual maintenance.

            You can find when a kernel is EOL on kernel.org. When your chosen LTS goes out of support, you should update (for security reasons). You’ll have to hope the 580 nvidia drivers still support the newer kernel version you move to.

            This path allows you to run your setup for as long as possible on Arch, when you run into issues with nvidia support, so does every other distro.