this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Are they supported longer on the windows driver?
Apparently? Title only mentions dropping the support on Linux. ๐คทโโ๏ธ
You don't have to updare your drivers though, isn't this normal with older hardware?
Not sure if you're on Windows or Linux but, on Linux, we have to actively take explicit actions not to upgrade something when we are upgrading the rest of our system. It takes more or less significant effort to prevent upgrading a specific package, especially when it comes in a sneaky way like this that is hard to judge by the version number alone.
On Windows you'd be in a situation like "oh, I forgot to update the drivers for three years, well that was lucky."
It makes me wonder why the package still auto updates if it detects you're using the driver that would be removed, surely it could do some checks first?
Would be vastly preferable to it just breaking the system.
It would be a very out-of-scope feature for a Linux package manager to do a GPU hardware check and kernel module use check to compare whether you're using the installed driver, and then somehow detect in the downloaded, about-to-be-installed binary that this will indeed remove support for your hardware.
It just seems very difficult to begin with, but especially not the responsibility of a general package manager as found on Linux.
On Windows, surely the Nvidia software should perform this detection and prevent the upgrade. That would be its responsibility. But it's just not how it is done on Linux.
It's not the package itself that "auto updates". The package manager just updates all the packages that have updates available, that's it.
But still, the system doesn't really "break", all you have to do is downgrade the package, then add a rule preventing it from being updated until Nvidia/Arch package maintainers add a new package that has only that legacy driver'# latest version, which won't be upgraded again.
If Linux is going to be usable by the average person on windows it needs to do something better than booting to a CLI and making the user figure out how to manually downgrade a package.
Is it the goal of Linux to be usable by the average person? Just asking.
I consider myself an average person. I'm a completely self-taught Linux user, until I learned a bunch more at uni, but that was a small fraction of what I know now and after I started using Linux.
I just followed the installation guide and searched the internet when I couldn't figure something out myself, just like I expect from the average schmuck. Especially a gamer schmuck who might know a thing or two more than average average schmucks who barely use computers at all.
You know what I mean? Like are we expecting Linux to do Windows levels of handholding?
I know a lot of gamers who will happily drop into the firmware of their motherboard and tweak the timings of their RAM, but they can't expect to learn some command line commands? Read some documentation?
I believe the same SW version is packaged. Nvidia said they'd drop support in the 580 release, but they shifted it to 590 now.
The arch issues are another layer of headache by the maintainers changing the package names and people breaking their systems on update when a non-compatible version is pulled replacing the one with still pascal support in it.
Not really a problem of Arch, but of the driver release model, then, IMO. You'd have this issue on Windows too if you just upgraded blindly, right? It's Nvidia's fault for not naming their drivers, or versioning/naming them in a way that indicates support for a set of architectures. Not just an incrementing number willy nilly.
It's 2025, can we not display a warning message in pacman? Or letting it switch from nvidia-590 to nvidia-legacy?
I'm not an arch user, I admit, I don't like footguns.
TIL Arch is a footgun. ๐คก cope. ๐
But yeah, I agree, if package maintainers were astute there, a warning would've probably been good somehow. Not sure pacman supports pre-install warnings. Maybe? It does support warning about installing a renamed/moved package. But the naming would've had to be really weird for everyone involved if the warning would be clear in that case.
I admit, all distros are a different degree of footguns, I'm saying this as a nix user. lol
Just as with anything you do in life, take action with a healthy side of precaution.
This is a life lesson. I've learned to be careful around the oven. I've also learned to be careful running volatile commands. ๐
Windows doesnt drop to CLI and break if the graphics driver is missing. But also GPU driver updates are not forced on you just by updating the system.
Okay. Kind of a matter of definition of "breaking" but sure.
Right. But on Linux they happen automatically when upgrading the rest of your system, is what I was saying.
Windows doesn't force update your driver and remove support though, and even if it did it won't drop you to some CLI, it will still work.
Rolling distros also only update when you tell them. It is the user who is pulling the trigger on the footgun in both cases.
I'd say the main difference is that arch users are more trigger-happy about being up to date.
Also, I think pacman should at least warn you if the problem is enough to warrant a post on the arch website.
Sorta, but you run one command to update everything at once, and even though the system knows what GPU you have it still seems to update the driver to one thats not compatible, instead of holding that update back.
Also if it didn't warn the user when updating, the user had no idea they were pulling any trigger, especially when Linux falls back to CLI after this instead of just falling back to a basic driver.
What you described is what happaned with arch. The transitioning shouldn't have happened this way, IMO.
Other distros usually don't send their users to TTY after an update if they can help it.
On the long term, the situation is the same on linux and windows: you choose the latest driver and live with that given feature set and its bugs.
It will, if you install the informant package from the aur or the chaotic-aur unofficial repo.
Otherwise you can follow the advice in the wiki System maintenance page, which says to read the home page, or news RSS feed, or arch-announce mailing list before upgrading.