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.

  • f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz
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    3 hours ago

    I’m no expert but it’s fairly easy to mitigate.

    From https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-driver-drops-pascal-support-main-packages-switch-to-open-kernel-modules/

    Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support: Uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms packages. Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

    Translates to:

    sudo pacman -Rdd nvidia nvidia-lts nvidia-dkms

    yay -S nvidia-580xx-dkms

    In attempting this, I still had a conflict with lib32-nvidia-utils, so this should work better:

    sudo pacman -Rdd nvidia nvidia-lts nvidia-dkms lib32-nvidia-utils

    yay -S nvidia-580xx-dkms lib32-nvidia-580xx-utils

    Using yay -Syy nvidia-580xx-dkms lib32-nvidia-580xx-utils means you don’t have to manually approve these replacement packages in the process, I think?

    EndeavourOS, BTW