In December 2025, NVIDIA made the controversial decision to drop support for Pascal architecture GPUs (GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series) from their main driver branch, transitioning to driver version 590.
This decision affected millions of users with older but still-capable hardware.
- The decision forced users with older GPUs to choose between abandoning modern Linux updates or switching to legacy driver packages from the AUR (Arch User Repository).
- This fragmentation creates maintenance nightmares for system administrators managing heterogeneous hardware environments.
Bibliography:
- Larabel, M. (2025, December 20). Arch Linux’s main NVIDIA driver packages now using the open kernel modules. Phoronix. Retrieved from https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-LInux-NVIDIA-Open-Default
- Hackaday. (2025, December 26). NVIDIA drops Pascal support on Linux, causing chaos on Arch Linux. Retrieved from https://hackaday.com/2025/12/26/nvidia-drops-pascal-support-on-linux-causing-chaos-on-arch-linux/
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