Will Manjaro developers make 470.x drivers as LTS? Should I consider to switch from Manjaro to Debian while the stable branch of Manjaro is not updated?
I reckon this was a problem on your end? I only have my 1080Ti, since Ryzen 5600X has no integrated GPU.
Well, more things will change with the Xorg-Stack in general when Xorg-Server 21.0 will hit Linux World at some point. Most likely AMD is supported by this change, Nvidia we have to see.
Some think Linux Distros as a save haven for old hardware. Well it works with the free drivers just fine to give you Video playback, Office abilities and casual Gaming. Video rendering or other hardware acceleration is available with proprietary drivers, if the manufacturer still supports it. I can totally understand Nvidia as a manufacturer to drop old and outdated hardware they once produce. The customers simply expect to have them supported until they physically broke. Maintaining a Linux driver for so many possibilities is kinda hard.
So my Nvidia card was released Sep 6th, 2012, which is now 9 years ago. For electronics with 2 yrs warranty max that is more than 3 times it’s calculated life span.
Since Windows is more or less based on MSDOS kinda, manufacturer simply release one driver and it most likely will just work after once created. On the Linux side of things they have constantly update them. You can have a look at the deprecation list. So time is counting fast to end of 2022 as shown here. A list of old cards can be found here.
My father was in Germany in 1980’s and bought there audio cassette tape recorder Sharp. It worked ~20 years without any repair till 2000’s. This is fair and excellent lifetime.
Well I bet you haven’t ever tried to heat it to 80 deg Celsius or so right?
Also, back in the day everything produced in Japan was of top-tier quality and it’s incorrect to compare those items with everything “made in China” now.
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This isn’t a loaded question as I really don’t know. How much work is it for the team to maintain the 470 driver as well as the 390? If its too much work and your saying 2012 is outdated then why not replace the 390 driver with the 470 as the legacy driver?
Fortunately I think my card should be ok with the 495 driver but I expect support to be dropped soon
classic example of how design philosophy went from being over-engineered for a lifetime use to just-engineered to current product cycle. having said that cassettes lasted from 70s into 90s, CDs 90s to barely 2000s, and now multiple streaming formats that barely last years. innovation feeds this and is not bad in anyway, just that it plays into “planned obsolescence” which is not necessarily the same thing.
I would rather there be R390 and a R470 branch, since Fermi still has another year left of support. It isn’t that much work, it’s just that right now R470 is still technically the latest stable branch.
I hope that Manjaro does support R470 with mhwd as it does with R390, as it works very well out of the box.
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This is a reasonable request up to a certain point. Eventually you have to let go and realize that the past is the past.
Do note I do believe Manjaro should support R390 and R470, but once those two are EOL, Manjaro should drop them, and Fermi/Kepler users should switch to Nouveau or get a newer supported GPU
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The current R470 is broken and has regressions with Gsync. That is why it is not yet released to the stable branch. R495 fixed that issue, dropped some cards and added new regressions. So we have to see how Nvidia goes on with this. Personally I’m not so happy about their current QA and driver releases …
Granted, 495 is a beta release. Let’s hope these new regressions are gone by the actual release… Preferably an update to the beta release, too, to get rid of and test the fix for this dbus shenanigans.
Their stable R470 driver also has regressions to the point of not being able to boot up. This isn’t exactly a fun situation.
Lately both Windows and Linux drivers have had stability issues, hopefully the next R495 release fixes issues on both sides.
Since this is more about Nvidia anyway: Their License and Warranty states clear that they at most expect a usage of max 3 yrs on their cards. So let’s see how long legacy cards get supported in Linux…
I am just a
$ inxi -Gazy1 | grep -i device
Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics 620
$
user.
Here you talk about driver updates. Are they so critical to be updated? May be their lifespan is not over if there is no new updates available? It is much harder when a HW have no drivers at all, than to have a several-years old driver. Or in a few months a compatibility issues with other environment will appears? Which kind are they?
So the question is: why to have newest drivers on an old HW could be so critical what to use an older driver version from epoch of that HW is so inappropriate?
PS
Have you already posted your issue reports on nvidia forum and bug report websites? Does the nvidia developers aware about your issues?
EDIT
Or nvidia itself dropped some old HW support and it is a discussion on how GNU/Linux community can substitute nvidia manufacturer in terms of driver development?
And what Windows users, who have the same old HW do?
It looks like you are intel GPU user and it works with built-in opensource driver.
Its closest to your edit comment - but still not that - the open drivers ‘work’ just not as well for AAA games etc. And its really only an issue with nvidia. Things like intel and amd and other firmware and software should generally be fine to update and maintain.
Even if it were somehow the case that some people wanted a frozen old version for some ancient hardware - then manjaro would generally be a specifically bad choice as a rolling distro that updates.
If you mean about how/easy to use newer drivers with older hardware … thats just a compatibility thing thats up to the driver developers and/or their respective companies.
Whats happening here is nvidia is dropping support for some older cards and drivers and has released new drivers that dont work particularly well. Now manjaro may need to make a decision about which packages to offer, whether legacy versions should be manually retained, and for how long.
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As far as I remember, the last more or less free from issues driver was R465.
I’d stayed on it if I was affected by Nvidia dropping support for my GPU.
So will package nvidia-470xx appear in Manjaro or not?
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This is pretty much all most of us are asking for, can the team maintain another legacy driver and how much work is it to do so
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