It’s no surprise that NVIDIA is gradually dropping support for older videocards, with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed. What’s more surprising is the terrible way t…
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.
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.