Whenever I upgrade my kernel, I have to manually remove with pacman nvidia-utils and lib32-nvidia-utils in order to be able to remove the previous kernel’s nvidia driver and install the new one.
This seems to happens because the nvidia-utils package depends on the driver, so it cannot be upgraded.
What happens, is that if I upgrade my kernel, but forget to manually take care of the driver, the next time I boot, LDM wouldn’t start, and I won’t have GUI… I think this isn’t a desirable behavior.
This happened when transitioning from 5.8 to 5.9, as well as when transitioning from 5.9 to 5.10, the nvidia driver’s version is 455 (now called video-nvidia on mhwd), it was also the case for 450.