I’m using GTX 1080 ti, and the last supported version of the drivers is going to be 580.
Question is - will pamac automatically know to use the legacy driver for my card, or will my system start breaking after every upgrade? Is there anything in particular I need to do ahead of time to prevent a broken system (apart from upgrading the card).
Hello,
Since no one answered yet, let me give you some weak points (i have no self experience, so take it with a grain of salt 
) 
At the moment the latest legacy driver can be chosen at Application Menue>System>Manjaro Settings Manager>Hardware Configuration> 470.xx is the latest legacy driver at the moment, probably this will change soon.
Source: Unix Drivers | NVIDIA
Nvidia Beta driver 590.44.01 has no longer listed Maxwell and Pascal.
I heared some rumor’s that you should stay on the LTS Kernel’s that’s released before the nvidia legacy driver going alive.
From my understanding i saw people in the recent year’s only facing problems in our forum’s after some nvidia package renaming stuff. Which happend in the last 5 year’s 2-3 times, if i remember correctly.
For additional safety, always create a timeshift snapshot and prepare a Linux Bootstick to chroot.
Now Arch announced they’re going to rename nvidia to nvidia-open (and nvidia-dkms to nvidia-open-dkms, nvidia-lts to nvidia-open-lts) R590 and drop support for GTX 10.
They recommend uninstalling the nvidia package before upgrade and installing the legacy nvidia driver from AUR - which sounds like a bad idea for Manjaro users (as AUR usage is discouraged).
I hope mhwd handles this transition more gracefully. I guess it would have video-nvidia-580xx as the driver pinned for Pascal? Would it automatically uninstall video-nvidia and install video-nvidia-580xx for me, or will I need to do it manually?
I’m almost certain there will be a graceful solution to this by Manjaro team. For now - as I’m also a cautious Nvidia user here kekw - I manually intervened just in case: uninstalled nvidia driver from mhwd, and installed nvidia-570xx-dkms which is in the repo.
By this step, I secured myself from the regular nvidia-dkms cause it will go into 590 aswell, and if I overlook one upgrade (which I usually do, lol), that would pull in 590 and then I would need to chroot, (which I’m ok with, but not really want to) 
So in this case, I kinda like “fixated” myself to 570, because that’s never gonna change anymore.
…Anyways, my “secret” plan is to change it manually to nvidia-580xx-dkms when (or if) it gets released into the Manjaro’s repo, and then call it a day until I finally make my swtich to a full AMD build and forget my last 8years of love-hate relationship with Nvidia on Linux… 
Well, using the AUR on Arch isn’t recommended either. You may read the post about the nvidia driver situation this way, but the usual guidelines read different. (The AUR is part of the Arch community but not part of the Arch distribution which would be the software collection in the Arch stable branch.)
Anyway, the point is you are not on Arch but on Manjaro and Manjaro provides its own kernels and drivers which have to fit together. One can’t simply follow instructions given for a different distribution particularly when the differences matter like for a combination of kernels and drivers. I don’t own nvidia cards but from my observation Manjaro caters a lot about nvidia driver support. Chances are Manjaro will offer a solution or make a recommendation of its own.
In another direction “freezing” drivers on your own in a rolling release isn’t so ideal because you get frequent changes naturally so in such a case one would consider using a point release preferably with LTS.
if mhwd -li shows latest driver installed: linux-nvidia system will require manual intervention to install a legacy driver
mhwd has video-nvidia-570xx and video-nvidia-575xx legacy drivers for systems with Maxwell and Pascal GPUs, but neither seem to be working well
Manjaro extra repository also has Dynamic Kernel Module Support drivers
nvidia-575xx-dkms
nvidia-575xx-open-dkms
nvidia-570xx-dkms
nvidia-570xx-open-dkms
So I need to uninstall the mhwd driver and use pamac to install nvidia-575xx-dkms from the extras repo?
yupp
You can think of each major version number (570, 575, etc) as a separate driver. They’re in separate packages.
When you update, the package manager looks for a newer version of each package that is installed. Let’s say you use this driver: linux612-nvidia-570xx - the package manager will only update to a newer version of that package (so in this case, a newer version of 570 compiled for Linux 6.12).
It will not update to linux612-nvidia-580xx because that’s a different package, which would need to be explicitly installed.
Same goes for the dkms versions, they’re also separate packages (just not tied to a specific kernel version).
mhwd is used to manage drivers, so you’d use it if you wanted to change the driver. Updating is done through the package manager.
I seriously hate Nvidia doing this. Not like I had a rosy picture of them before either. My card is just old enough that I wasn’t too much aware of that stuff back then. But it’s still been well enough for my gaming needs.
And yeah, I also can’t afford a new card. Especially after the prices start rising due to the memory shortage. Have to see if I can get my hands on an affordable used AMD one.
If you can find an AMD RX 580/590 for a reasonable price, then give it some consideration – the RX 580 I’m using now is a decent workhorse – same card I’ve used with Wayland for over two years, which has never given any trouble.
Thanks for the tip.