It’s no surprise that NVIDIA is gradually dropping support for older videocards, with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed. What’s more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.
On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell or similarly unsupported GPU will result in the new driver failing to load and thus the user getting kicked back to the CLI to try and sort things back out there. This issue is summarized by [Brodie Robertson] in a recent video.
Here the ‘solution’ is to switch to a legacy option that comes from the Arch User Repository (AUR), which feels somewhat sketchy. Worse is that using this legacy option breaks Steam as it relies on official NVIDIA dependencies, which requires an additional series of hacks to hopefully restore this functionality. Fortunately the Arch Wiki provides a starting point on what to do.
It’s also worth noting that this legacy driver on the AUR is being maintained by [ventureo] of the CachyOS project, whose efforts are the sole reason why these older NVIDIA cards are still supported at all on Linux with the official drivers. While there’s also the Nouveau driver, this is effectively a reverse-engineering project with all of the problems that come with such an effort, even if it may be ‘good enough’ for older GPUs.
I (can’t) use Arch, btw
Jokes aside, I went from Lubuntu (2 years) ->Xubuntu (6 years) -> Arch (1 year) -> Artix (2 years) -> Linux Mint (4 years and counting). Linux mint really is pretty good
Mint is like a little peaceful haven away from all the tribal bickering and toxic geekery – it’s exactly what an OS should be: unobtrusive and reliable.
I have to ask, did you by any chance use an LLM to write this comment?
Can we stop with the “EM dashes mean AI” bit? EM dashes do not automatically mean someone used an LLM; plenty of people use them daily.
It’s a good thing to be annoyed by being accused of using AI because of Em dashes. You see, before AI, a large portion of the intelligent population never even noticed that these were different than dashes. I just figured they were a different font. Would you rather your usage of EM dashes continue to be pointless and ignored? Our would you rather the larger population learns the distinction and so can benefit from the time you took to use them.
no.
Why and how do people type out an em dash? On the visual side, it looks nearly identical to a regular dash, just a bit wider. And on the practical side, do people remap keys to type out an em dash? Is there some keyboard shortcut?
stale lame played out and reductive bit. read the words for what they’re worth bro you’re looking right through them and at some random object off in the distance, ultimately contributing nothing to the convo as a result.
I concur
I concur… only version that got my Window friends happily out of Winwoes
Mint Cinnamon works great. Recommend to anyone that asked. The reason I ended up on (K)Ubuntu was back when the AMD Ryzen line of processors first came out, Mint did not support it at the time, but the latest Ubuntu (non-LTS) did. So I just stayed as it was/is still very reliable. I use the LTS version for all my systems.
rc – rclark — hit return to soon… Can’t edit…
I went from Slack (on floppy disks) -> Red Hat -> Fedora Core -> Fedora -> Mint -> Ubuntu and stayed.
That’s exactly what I get from windows 11 pro. Cool.
WTF? 😂
But then what do I expect from a hobby OS which was modeled after software used in 1970s telephone exchanges and other embedded systems.
At least on Windows running Windows Update will either load last available driver or default to failsafe generic MS driver which still provides working UI at 1920×1080.
+1
L4, BeOS, MacOS Copland or OS/2 Warp had evaluated fresh concepts back then but we ended up with crusty-rusty *nix,
an obsolete technology from mainframe and teletype writer era of the 1960s.
Somewhen in history we took the wrong turn, unfortunately.
Same goes for UDP and TCP/IP, maybe. The venerable X.25 protocol,- as widely used in Europe of the 1970s/1980s -, was the more sophisticaded design.
Cheap is the enemy of good, because it drops the bar of what people will accept. You tolerate paper and plastic shoes that last a single winter because they only cost you 20 bucks, or plastic trinkets off of TEMU because it’s literally a dime a dozen. This kills the real value off the market and splits it into cheap crap and ridiculously priced “premium” crap which is only marginally better to differentiate itself from the total junk.
Now, see what happens when you have a completely free thing on the market. Like a completely free operating system. The bar is now laying on the ground. All it has to do is boot up, and people will waste their time and effort in vain trying to make it work without any sort of coordination or consensus.
typing in khtml fork or gecko powered browser, that irony …. anyway, search for “windows boot loop recovery”, that shYt is paid SW, then you can talk about something….
Like I said, when the competition is free but crap, the pricier competition only needs to be marginally better in some ways that matter to command an audience. Premium crap.
Windows boot loop that affects 0.002% of the installed base… nothing. The only reason it hits the news is because there’s literally billions of Windows users.
They used to have a poll about how many users experienced serious show-stopping breakdowns every time Ubuntu upgraded to the next version. It used to be in the 30% range – then they stopped counting.
Wtf is a temu?
Hi there! That reminds me of something!
In German, there’s the saying “geschenkt is noch zu teuer” (translates to “being given as a gift is still too expensive”).
That’s how many of us had felt when Windows 10 was offered for “free” when Windows 7 was still current.
Because, some of us were rather willing to pay a few hundred € every
few years for a full version (retail, no subscription model) of a new Windows that won’t bother us and won’t spy on us.
In this mindset, peace of mind is more important than making “a good deal”, so to say.
That’s why Mac users are generally more happy overall, I assume.
The initial costs are higher, but on other hand the system doesn’t get on each user’s nerves, no bloatware or adware, “it just works”.
Well, most of time. macOS has its flaws, too. 😄
So, can you list one better operating system? ‘Cause your argument about the lack of innovation applies more to Windows than Linux. Maybe iOS has some feature you might consider ground-breaking, but the overall OS is… not good for much. So, what do you approve of? :)
The fall back for the hobby OS which happens to be the most common operating system (except for desktop use, but it is slowly gaining traction) in the world, for nVidia is the Nouveau driver, which allows for ALL resolutions and a full graphical desktop.
You might want to look at the top 500 super computer list too – No Windows or anything else but Linux to be found there :)
Although calling Linux and operating system is now common, Linux is just the kernel. GNU most commonly makes up the rest and then there are are huge amount of choices of desktop environments and distributions.
Arch is very much a minority used distribution. The most popular distro Ubuntu, has no problems with the nVidia driver.
Perhaps if you knew more about Linux, you would be ashamed of Windows like the rest of us!
If we’re being looking a bit sarcastic/cynical at it (just a tiny bit!):
The best thing about Linux is that it’s free of charge (no licensing fees) and is mostly safe from issues involving software patents.
And that it has so many volunteers that was.., devote their lifes and work for free.
So it will run on every niche config such as toasters, pregnancy testers, torpedos and super computers – except for classic x86 PCs (486, 586).
Linus ecosystem thrives thanks of all the sl*ve labour in software industry that contributors provide.
It’s like the IT equivalent of the church, maybe.
Linux is the spiritual lead and all the believers around globe spread its word, perform duties in the name of it etc. All free of charge, of course.
In return, they get a warm fuzzy feeling in their stomach. What a reward. 🩶 Merry Christmas. 🎄🌠
sounds like someone dipped in the good stuff again for christmas….
how come all the naysayers dont even touch the subject why linux is more commonplace than any other OS: reliability, security, versatility, openness and data policies. being free and maintained is just the cherry on top not the reason for its popularity.
and yes im saying all this being a long term windows user who has only used linux a few times in the past but with all the shit MS is doing it dosnt look like there is much alternatives for the future….
and btw in what universe is volunteering the same as slave labour?
The reason why MS can keep abusing their users so much is because they know that Linux won’t offer any real competition for the masses of users out there. There won’t be a big exodus off Windows because the alternative just doesn’t work well for them. Never has, never will.
The year of Linux on the deskop has been called for 25 years and it never came. There’s no reason to assume the fragmented dysfunctional community can pull itself together and work towards a common goal to offer any real resistance to the big monopolies.
Who cares that Linux runs all the supercomputers – that’s like saying “Oh, you won’t see a Lexus plowing a potato field, that means your car is total junk. You should drive a Kubota to work instead!”
Hi, I wasn’t exactly dead serious about this one.
What I meant to address was that companies and other big projects do benefit from the hard work done by individuals,
without them being properly acknowledged/credited in the process.
That’s why Linux is often being used in super computers and other obscure applications.
The basic infrastucture was provided by others, already.
Linux had been ported to all sorts of firmwares and processor types.
The code quality of Linux is secondary to these users.
Linux is useful because it’s a low-risk, low-invest choice.
Comparable to how Windows CE or Windows 3.x/9x had been used in the 90s as an cheap and well supported hardware abstraction layer/framework/runtime.
You had medical devices, CNC machines and oscilloscopes running consumer class Windows (DOS-based line),
which originally was never intended to be running in sensitive applications.
We perhaps could compare the Linux support to rail roads being built in distant places such as Africa a hundred years ago.
Back then, all sorts of people had to work hard to built an infracture others could use.
On a second thought, this comparison makes it even worse, maybe. 😅
Very odd post.
Linux and various distributions has ton of corporate and nation contributors. Those contributors absolutely get paid. Look at Valve employee salaries and they do a ton of upstream work. Similarly look at RedHat.
Sure there’s enthusiasts who contribute on their own accord without payment. But, the current system is pretty nice if you think about it. I think having other options that are open source is paramount. Let’s talk about freedom because slavery was dropped.
If Windows, Android and iOS decide everything you do on a computer is fair game for LLM’s and other models. Lets also say they can, do, and would sell all of your activities in a human or machine queryable way to the highest and lowest bidders, it endangers what users can even do on their computers while calling it “their own”. From running companies, to creating art, or having medical information stay private. Imagine buying a summary of your competitors last quarter of activity? Sounds outlandish but its not even sci-fi. After-all we accept the terms and conditions otherwise we have bricks not machines anyways. More or less that is where this is all heading. Long live Linux or anything that offers alternatives to 3 companies.
Ignore Joshua—-
He is just a troll.
Always has been.
He lives in a basement with his cat.
At least he’s more umderstandable than amanfromars…
:-)
Actually, I’m a graceful forest fairy. And I live in the attic ..with my cat. 🐱🩶
You can write “slave” here. No need to censor yourself.
Bill is obviously trolling. Please ignore the damn troll and it will go away.
That should be “number”, not “amount” of choices. Also remember ‘fewer’ rather than ‘less’ is something is countable (even theoretically).
In my house (and now my parents), Linux Desktop is here. All my laptops/desktops/servers/SBCs run it. Doesn’t get any better no-how. Your allowed to pick the Distro of your choice. Your allowed to pick a Desktop Environment that works for you (or just console if you prefer), and of course just about any application you need to run. Doesn’t get any better.
Not just a hobby OS either. Used for real work everywhere. Even in our office (which is an M$ shop for desktops) have back end systems that are Linux. Energy Management Systems, Distribution Management Systems, all can and do run Linux for high reliability. M$ even runs Linux on its back-end… It is multi-user (1 to thousands) out of the box. At work I’ve been fighting to get more than 2 users (a license problem) on several of our Windows Servers since June. Still no resolution from IT….
Other flavors of linux still support NVIDIA Pascal GPU’s. It’s a hiccup in a specific distribution. There is no fundamental reason why the linux kernel or even arch linux cannot support the hardware. They don’t right now though.
The real issue in my opinion is NVIDIA and their historical and shamelessly bad support for Linux. They’ve made some efforts to relicense their code in the past year but its still rough out there. Why that is still the case when buckets of the linux computational world, who are by far the biggest consumers of their products, should be more of a point of concern. Or even inquiry… The linux community had to do some pretty desperate things for years to support NVIDIA GPU’s. Nowdays things are more turnkey, but the barrier’s NVIDIA made with its drivers probably cost a collective thousand human years of labor to overcome.
I could go on, in volumes, about why Windows has been and is directed towards the abyss of nonutility since roughly the year 2005 but that’s neither here nor there.
The newer FOSS drivers rely on offloading tasks to the GPU’s GSP. However, Pascal and older cards don’t have a GSP. I suspect they are dropping support for older cards without a GSP in the newer drivers so that they don’t have to maintain two different driver branches, which should make the FOSS drivers have parity with the Windows drivers.
Lol. As if you would have a chance Microsoft supporting a machine that old. Windows is fine as the get-you-going freebie that comes with a PC for playing Solitaire on and such, but it’s hardly a serious OS. It’s barely an operating system at all. Always better to spend a little bit more and get a Mac.
Windows is ‘free’ partly because you don’t own it. You only have a license to use it.
Please explain how it’s fault of Linux and/or distributions that NV stops releasing updated drivers after insisting they will be doing them binary-only while also not releasing any hardware documentation. While their customers are still using those devices daily. Because some cutting edge GPU vendors clearly manage to support practically all of their past hardware on Linux just fine and this doesn’t happen with their drivers, inside the mainline Kernel tree.
it falls back to console. it’s not their fault when you are not able to use it.
This article gives somewhat of a skewed representation of how the Arch Linux team has handled this transition. Sure, it hasn’t been smooth, but it’s not the dumpster fire that is being hinted at here either.
They have posted an article on what to do if you’re running 10xx and older cards almost a week ago here: https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-driver-drops-pascal-support-main-packages-switch-to-open-kernel-modules/
Sure, the drivers for 10xx cards may not work flawlessly in all scenarios (for now, i should say), but that can hardly be laid at the feet of the Arch Linux dev team. Maybe look to NVIDIA and their policy of planned obsolescence for that. And please, don’t come here arguing that a $5T market cap company can’t afford to keep supporting older hardware. They just don’t want to.
This is why I will NEVER buy a graphics card with an nVidia GPU again. As a Gentoo monolithic kernel user, I had lived in nVidia support hell for too long. Nouveau gives it a good try, but like the article says, it’s a reverse-engineered product with all the baggage that brings.
I’m not a gamer, so maybe nVidia graphics is superior to ATI/AMD, but on my 3-monitor workstation, I get everything I need built in to the kernel with AMD GPUs. And it “just works”. (Although finding the right kernel module and the right firmware can be a pain sometimes )
You buy a device from a notoriously obnoxious company that doesn’t document anything, ships only binary drivers, and has notoriously always operated exactly that way. That company drops support for that device. You are not now in a good position to complain about an open source OS not fixing the problem you and your vendor caused.
Oh, crap. I’m using Manjaro on my desktop with a GTX1060 card. I was NOT planning on replacing that (ever) since I’m not a gamer. I do sometimes run steam and play a game (like 3 times/year). I better be careful during the upcoming updates… Maybe Nouveau can save me.
Did NOT intend to post this as a reply.
When I bought my current desktop 6 years ago, I went for an AMD card (RX-5700) just because they have an officially supported OpenSource driver. This fixes many potential headaches in Linux, and although OSS drivers can also deprecate and remove supported HW, they usually support it for much longer.
This article is completely full of imprecisions.
Fist of all, this is Nvidia’s fault as they decided to drop support for older cards from their official driver, not Archlinux’s decision.
Second, the arch team did post a warning and instruction on what to do for users with older cards.
Third, the legacy driver from the AUR is not being mantained by a user, the user only maintains the PKGBUILD script used to pull the 580 driver directly from nvidia’s website and package it for arch.
Fourth, it is downright false that “using this legacy option breaks Steam as it relies on official NVIDIA dependencies”. Steam does not complain and works without issues using the 580 driver. The “legacy” 580 driver is an official NVIDIA driver, and up until 5 days go it was the official, state of the art driver.
Archlinux users are warned pretty much at every possible opportunity that they should pay attention to system updates. In my case, as owner of a pascal card, last time I tried to update the system, I was presented with a warning message saying that the ‘nvidia’ driver was going to be replaced with ‘nvidia-open’, which I already knew was incompatible with my card, as per the Arch linux wiki that I reviewed when configuring my system. A quick google search pointed me to the Arch team’s post, and simply installing the 580 package from aur cleanly and elegantly handled the package substitution, after reboot I jumped straight back to my steam games with no issue at all.
TL;DR:
typical sloppy Maya text where they vibe together something they have absolutely no clue about.
Nvidia support in Linux is often nonexistant. For this reason I keep a windows machine, there’s just no reasonable replacement for directx12. Swapping opengl for vulkan means most steal games that are as old as directx9 require vulkan. This ups the price of Linux gaming admission by hundreds of dollars.
I thought this was about the Pascal language not some video card.
Can’t Arch use a different (older) Nvidia driver for those GPUs not supported by the newest one? That’s what Ubuntu does, but the drivers don’t come through the standard software channels. I’m still using a 750Ti and it installed the appropriate (if admittedly slightly broken with Vulkan 1.3) drivers.
It doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. I’m one of the people who, if i was using a GPU, i’d be using an old one. In fact, almost a decade ago i bought an ancient GPU intending to install it, but i never got around to it. And since that time, i’m pretty sure that the standard integrated laptop graphics has caught up to the fanciest game i know (doom 3).
And i’m the kind of guy who doesn’t mind jumping through some hoops to install a back version of a driver. I am not made of sugar and i will not melt in the rain, nor will i cry if i get punted to the console / single-user until i get X11 working again. In fact, now that storage is so wildly abundant, i’ve taken to making a full copy of the OS once i get the drivers working, so i can work around this exact sort of scenario (digging up old binaries for a mix-and-match).
People who need turn-key solutions i think upgrade their OS only when they upgrade their hardware. The combination of OS update and old hardware just seems like a pretty specifically-selected group to me.
Feels wrong. Why can you not load an older driver?
I get that moving from 32bit to 64bit caused a break. But this 4 year LTS cycle just seem to be an excuse to no longer do architecture. Now the hardware vendor wants in on that too.
Next are the cars? The python in my engine management unit is no longer supported? nVidia driver for the rear view camera?
Using older drivers is not secure as they may contain unfixed security issues
hahaha yeah and new drivers don’t
Arch tends to be a rolling release, so there’s no unstable / stable branch like other distro’s instead everything is cutting edge so you get it as soon as it’s released.
It’s why personally I opt for gentoo but with binary packages enabled as you get a bit more control that way, you get a stable branch but with the option to unmask more unstable packages on a per package basis
Use the force and use open source drivers. If they don’t support open source drivers buy a different brand of hardware.
Was it because I said “slave”?
Nah, don’t worry. I think the many comments had been reviewed.
It sometimes happens on HaD, I think, if a lot of weird comments appear.
That’s understandable, I think.
It should be legally required for a company to open source firmware/drivers etc if they choose to stop supporting a product or stop a cloud service for a product.
Obviously no company can support a product forever, but if they wont, then it should be left to others in the open source community to continue supporting the product if they want to.
Linux should have unbreakable UI. It should reverse to VESA with no video accel or 3d but it should never break.
The CLI is a (mostly) unbreakable UI. It’s just not the GUI you’re used to. If you’re using Arch and can’t use the terminal, you should pick another distro.
I was not aware Pascal is still around baked into THAT segment of computing. Tho, truth being told, I already know the answer.
Only mildly related, decades ago I’ve run across a number of Pearl routines propping up many a super-uber-duper manager careers by the virtue of running on some kind of mainframe (or PC, no matter – “mainframe” stands for “largely obsolete piece of machinery that should have been in the museum long time ago”) being integral part of critical infrastructure. The critical infrastructure upon which layers upon layers of additional systems were running providing endless telescoping career ladders.
I’ve also worked with (now happily retired, btw) programmers who were permanently stuck endlessly tweaking/updating mainframe assembler routines by hand. No easy matter, since those could not be just replaced by the high-school-grad-learning-how-to-program cheapest programs written in whatever the latest fad is, JavaScript, or C#, or visual-tsotchki, same difference. Kids these days don’t wanna learn mainframe assembler, even with the latest/greatest Z-OS, they want integrated IDEs with AI-assisted toolery doing all the thinking for them, while they push “do work” buttons.