What happened to Nvidia driver 396.18?

Support Graphics & Display
1

Hello all,

While doing some research on the net, I encountered that there is a (beta) driver 396.18 available for Fermi GPUs on Linux, which is even supposed to support Vulkan.

For reasons unknown to me, this driver seems to have disappeared from Arch, AUR, and, consequently, from Manjaro as well. There was a discussion about that driver in the past at [Testing Update] 2018-04-30 - Kernels, Trizen, Compiz - Testing Updates - Manjaro Linux Forum

Is there a reason why nobody is using that driver and instead, everybody is preferring the (apparently older) driver 390.xx for Fermi GPUs?

2

Hello,

You already, sort of, provided the answer to your question. That driver was beta and never passed that stage. Was written in 2018 …
The 390.144 that is provided with the 390.xx is actually newer, but is a legacy driver, for older-generation NVIDIA GPUs which are no longer supported.

The .run file still exists if you want to download it, but i doubt you will get anywhere with it …