Regarding the nvidia-settings splitout from nvidia-uitls there is an ongoing discussion: [pci] add nvidia-settings, nvidia-470xx-settings, nvidia-390xx-settings (!17) · Merge requests · Applications / mhwd-db · GitLab. Yes from a users point of view we managed to remove some piece of software which was installed before and you’re used to it. Having the option to have a headless install is not wanted in most cases.
The MHWD profile update will install nvidia-settings on new systems but it seems not on existing installations. So we can now add nvidia-settings as a hard dependecy of nvidia-utils, even it might be the wrong build order and loose the headless option, which we avoid anyway due a hard dependency on mhwd profiles, or revert back to the binary versions.
Manjaro is not Arch and sometimes we should not follow what they do. You as a user will have a binary in the end anyway. It is nice to see that there is now the source code available for review.
Some may know the manjaro-system package: Commits · master · Packages / Core / manjaro-system · GitLab We hardly update it the last years as some projects like https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/ you can find under Miscellaneous a comment why a remove of the pacman database lock might be a bad idea. Here is why we had that in the past. Arch had the sync first option, which we still patch into our alpm. With that we are able to install specific packages before an update happens. With our hacks we try to automate the manual needed inventions so you simply hit update and magic happens. A simple if nvidia-utils is under version without nvidia-settings then install it would help here so you won’t even notice that there was a technical split. Now you can argue if a controlled removal of the pacman database lock makes sense or not. So far we didn’t found a better solution to invade a running update process to seed manual tasks into it. The mentioned security issue was fixed a long time btw.
Technically there is now extra added workload for packaging the stuff as in one existing package that binary got removed and in an also existing package it changed to a split package. Whoever maintains the package updates of nvidia drivers doesn’t have extra workload.
The only thing what is missing here is a proper way for existing installs to get nvidia-settings installed without user intervention. Not everyone is reading those update announcements. Based on the installed systems with Manjaro only a fraction of our user base have even a forum account or may read it as a guest.