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.
The 580 legacy driver is DKMS, so there shouldn’t be any maintenance beyond what is already required for any other DKMS driver, which would be handled by pacman anyways. So no need to worry about kernel updates
If you’re adamant on keeping those GPUs, Nouveau would be the only path forward - eventually paired with NVK for Vulkan acceleration once that’s good enough for primetime. Pascal was dropped because of the lack of a GSP module as well as age, so the newer Nova driver won’t support it either
I would just lock the nvidia driver and kernel to the latest working LTS, maybe also stuff like mesa if necessary.
Just install the previous version and lock it.