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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Need help on installing NVIDIA drivers for old GPU. (self.linux)

submitted 1 year ago by tester1121 to c/[email protected]

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I have a GeForce 210 GPU on an EndeavourOS computer. I use Noveau drivers, but some apps like Blender have a broken user interface, and KDE acts weird sometimes. I tried installing the proprietary NVIDIA drivers following the Archlinux wiki, but I did not have any display output at all. I also tried running the NVIDIA driver .run file, but it warned me about changing drivers, and I don't know how to do that. I don't think that I understand the steps in the wiki. I would also like to use Wayland on my computer.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately, as people have already said, the most recent version of the closed-source driver will only support recent hardware. Nvidia periodically deprecates swathes of cards. Gentoo has a nice chart of which was the last driver version to support which GPU, plus other details. Your problems may be arising in part from the fact that your card has no Vulkan or OpenGL 4 support.

From my experience with a card from the generation previous to yours (NV40/Curie) for which I kept the proprietary drivers for a while after their best-before date had passed, it causes some trouble. The older drivers get to a point where they won't work with newer kernels or X versions (in your case, you can use at most kernel 5.4 and Xorg 1.20, per nvidia ). I ended up keeping an old kernel until the accumulation of needed bug fixes got to be too much and I switched to Nouveau.

Long-term, it's just more of a nuisance than it's worth. Use Nouveau, turn off fancy effects or downgrade to software rendering on anything that's glitchy, and buy an AMD card next time.