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NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux (hackaday.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 4 points 9 months ago (5 children)

You don't have to updare your drivers though, isn't this normal with older hardware?

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    You don't have to updare your drivers though.

    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."

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    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?

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