NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux

NVIDIA has been 'gradually dropping support for older videocards,' notes Hackaday, '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.



'Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support,' explains an announcement on the Arch Linux mailing list. But Hackaday points out that using the 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.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.