I have the same issue on my dad’s PC with deepin. Composing works for a while then it breaks and stops, altering config value that is not exposed in GUI, so I have to modify config to make composing work again. It looks like a deepin or driver problem? This PC is also using Nvidia 340xx drivers. Since this is not a gaming PC, nouveau drivers should be also an OK choice, so maybe I switch to them. Thanks for the tip.
Есть еще много людей которые используют nvidia старых версий… Не все могут обновить жележо хотябы до 390.
Welcome to Manjaro,
please use english language in the non-language-specific forum categories.
deepl.com translation:
There are still many people who use old versions of nvidia… Not everyone can upgrade iron to at least 390.
Just after writing that (a week ago) I looked on ebay
and bought a used Radeon R5 230 (fanless) for < 30 AUD.
It didn’t work at first – while still running the nvidia card I had to
uninstall the nvidia driver, before trying to use the radeon.
As I don’t use 3D at all, I can’t say how good it is compared to expensive nVidia cards,
but for anyone who doesn’t need high-end graphics, this is a cheap way out that works
(and might use less power).
1 Like
Next ask me and you can get that one I have 
The problem is that this way or formulating the question doesn’t tell much to non tech users like me. I use cheap and old nvidia card GT218[Geforce210] by ASUSTeK with 3.3.0 nvidia 340.108 and it works perfectly on 5.4 and 5.7 kernels. But when I updated kernel to 5.8 I can’t see Manjaro logo at start-up. I see just black screen. The same with 5.9 rc. I am afraid that I will not be able to use this card anymore but throwing out what worked so far because of drivers seems not very reasonable to me and not environment friendly. And above all I don’t feel like I what I do require more advanced / faster card.
I would prefer to not use nouveau because I had problems with them in the past. Please do whatever possible to let users of old nvidia cards / drivers to be able to use it as long as possible, so that each user is not forced to change hardware, but will do it at his/her convenience.
Reference:
Can’t login to 5.8.6-1, no problem with 5.7.19 -2
Edition:
The good news is that kernel 5.4 will will now be supported until December 2025
Edition2:
was the last release by Nvidia to support X 1.20 and Kernel 5.4
As soon as there is an update to X that driver is gone
Please clarify: if you keep that driver in repos will I be able to use it with kernel 5.4 until the end of support for 5.4? Or as soon as it happens I will need to switch to nouveau or buy a new card?
This reply is not “official”, I’m just a user like you, and this is how I understand it –
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Manjaro devs will keep the 340xx driver in the repo as long as it’s usable. Even when it’s not in the repo, you can keep your own copy and not upgrade.
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The problem is that Nvidia Corporation has stopped updating the 340xx driver. So Nvidia is pushing you to buy new hardware, not to the Manjaro devs. Please, everyone, don’t complain to Manjaro.
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For some previous end-of-life driver, Manjaro devs patched it to keep it working longer, but it took too much time and effort, so they don’t want to do it again. What you’re asking them to do is give you many man-hours of work for free so that you won’t have to buy a newer video card. (My earlier post shows that some 2nd-hand video cards are quite cheap.)
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As long as you stay with kernel 5.4, probably the kernel will not stop it working.
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At some point, an update to X11/Xorg will prevent unpatched 340xx from working with it. There have already been minor updates to X11, and 340xx still works. We can’t predict when X11 will change enough that 340xx will not work with it. When that happens it might be possible to downgrade your version of X11 for a while, but at some stage, downgrading X11 will cause other things to not work. (With a rolling distro you need to keep all of your system up-to-date, or things will break. LTS kernel 5.4 will be kept up-to-date by minor updates, so it’s OK, but X11 does not have LTS versions.)
3 Likes
Also, as already mentioned, for all these people with old Nvidia video cards, there is still the FREE open source nouveau driver available. It is not great for gaming, but I suppose people with these old cards are not gaming, and if they do then they probably do not play demanding games anyway so…
I don’t play games but I couldn’t use nouveau for some reason … maybe suspend/hibernate and resume didn’t work with it. Happy now that I have an old Radeon. 
Thank you for clarification. I definitely don’t want to force Manjaro team to do more job because it seems not reasonable in this case.
The conclusion is that, if we don’t want to be surprised by sudden X11 upgrade, we have a transition period now and we need to look for another card and cheap second hand AMD cards are a good solution for budget PC.
And this is especially the right solution for Plasma users, because sooner or later Plasma based Manjaro will switch to Wayland by default (as Fedora is doing) and nvidia and Wayland are not a good match anyway.
Of course nouveau and X11 will still be an option, at least for some users. I just checked nouveau and on my card is quite good. I watched 1080p youtube video without problem. So there is no reason to panic that suddenly we will get stuck with black screen after reboot without solution.
1 Like
I’m not even sure they can patch the drivers, Nvidia drivers are closed source so I don’t see how they could patch them.
Nice move, now you know you’re not having an existential crysis 
and the transition will be painless. It may not be the case for everyone but they, lke you, need to invest some time in trying (the use of TimeShift can help in case people are scared of breaking their system, if any problem they can rollback to previous system state).
I would have thought so too.
I thought it was mentioned in the original post, but it’s not:
https://archived.forum.manjaro.org/t/nvidia-deprecation-of-340xx-driver-series/123358
But in some other discussion around that time, it was mentioned.
Also, earlier in this thread:
2 Likes
How about getting RX 550 or something and sticking it to the greens?
The core of the driver is closed source, but it has a thin layer to communicate with the kernel. And that thin layer must be open source (in the sense that it is readable by everyone - not that it’s under (F)OSS licence) otherwise you would not be able to compile the kernel module for a given version of the kernel. That is the part that can be patched by everyone.
For the curious, if you download the installer from the official website, and run it with the --extract-only option, then it’ll extract the kernel driver, nvidia userspace libraries (Xorg, cuda, etc.), and nvidia userspace utilities (nvidia-smi, nvidia-bug-report.sh, etc.). In the kernel directory, you can find the source code of the “thin layer”. It is not that “thin”, actually. The “thin layer” of the 450.66 driver contains just shy of 155000 lines. The binary blob, the core of the driver, is in kernel/nvidia/nv-kernel.o_binary (about 26 MB).
8 Likes
Does anybody know if the nVidia driver v.390 will be available for kernel 5.9 as well, i.e., will there be something like linux59-nvidia-390xx ?
That would be great because my old rig equipped with a NVIDIA GF116 [GeForce GTX 550 Ti] graphics card works fine, and I do not want to throw it away yet.
Patches for 5.8 and 5.9 landed in the AUR two weeks ago for your information.
Hello, my experience is with an old PC (AMD athlon X2 260, Geforce 210, 4 GB RAM) and in it the Nvidia drivers only work correctly up to kernel 5.7 (I must say, that for my pc this kernel is the best, even comparing it with the 5.4 lts., for its better use of RAM and CPU, too bad it is an EOL kernel). As of kernel 5.8 I have to use the free drivers (noveau) because if not, manjaro will not start; Until now, there would be no problem because the solution would be to use noveau, but unfortunately with kernel 5.8, 5.9 and 5.10 RC, when opening (in chromium or firefox) at least 3-5 tabs with videos, the OS slows down (that is, it does not freeze, if not it slows down), I clarify that using noveau in kernel 5.4 and 5.7 this problem does not appear.
I discovered that when the real time 5.6 kernel Imhad been using upgraded itself to 5.9. I was able to run Timeshift to restore the missing GUI. I am running the 5.4 kernel now as you have indicated.
Buy Gt 1030