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.

TIL Arch is a footgun. 🤡 cope. 😉

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.

Windows doesnt drop to CLI and break if the graphics driver is missing.

Okay. Kind of a matter of definition of "breaking" but sure.

But also GPU driver updates are not forced on you just by updating the system.

Right. But on Linux they happen automatically when upgrading the rest of your system, is what I was saying.