Arch Linux Drops Support for NVIDIA Pascal and Older GPUs

Linux can be a solid option for anyone looking for an operating system that supports older hardware, but bleeding-edge distributions like Arch Linux often drop support for older hardware sooner than other distributions. This is exactly what happened recently, as the development team behind Arch Linux decided to upgrade the default NVIDIA GPU driver to version 590. This change means that Arch Linux will no longer support NVIDIA GPUs from the Pascal generation and older—this means GeForce GTX 1000 GPUs and older. Somewhat comically, this happened shortly after AMD's Linux kernel drivers extended support to AMD GPUs dating back to 2012.

Arch Linux has also migrated the default NVIDIA GPU drivers to the nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms, nvidia-open-dkms packages. Previously, the GTX 900 series GPUs were the oldest NVIDIA graphics cards supported by the Linux distro, although there are ways to work around the new support limitations. Users with older NVIDIA GPUs can manually uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, and nvidia-dkms packages and replace them with the nvidia-580xx-dkms drivers from the community-driven AUR (Arch User Repository).