How to downgrade kernel and deal with nvidia?

Support Graphics & Display
1

I’m on kernel 7.1.8 and I want to downgrade it to the 6.18LTS

I have my nvidia working.

What are the steps I should take? (I have timeshift just in case)

  1. How to remove the nvidia drivers?
  2. and replace them with what?

so I can downgrade the kernel to lts and reinstall the nvidia drivers.

> $ kinfo
Operating System: Manjaro Linux 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.7.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.28.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.1.8-1-MANJARO (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 22 × Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 185H
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (30.9 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Processor 2: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2

└> $ nvidia-smi
Sun Aug 23 13:34:00 2026       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 610.57.04              KMD Version: 610.57.04     CUDA UMD Version: 13.3

Thanks

2

just add kernel 6.18 Lts

sudo mhwd-kernel -li
sudo mhwd-kernel -l
sudo mhwd-kernel -i linux618
3

There’s no need to remove the driver unless you remove the kernel too. There are separate packages for each kernel so they can be installed alongside each other.

For your card, 6.18 will use linux618-nvidia-open and 7.1 will use linux71-nvidia-open. mhwd-kernel will install/remove the driver for you.

Install 6.18

sudo mhwd-kernel -i linux618

Then reboot into 6.18 and optionally remove 7.1

sudo mhwd-kernel -r linux71