Edit: "Updating to the legacy 580xx drivers doesn't show me a desktop anymore", just in case someone else can stumble upon this by searching something similar.

Thanks to @deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de and @Ooops@feddit.org I did try fixing it out of curiosity. I had forgotten to install linux-headers. Hopefully someone who actually has the same problem as me, and needs to fix it, can use the tips given in the comments. On my end, I just had to install linux-headers and one reboot later it worked.

Always check if you have all needed packages and don't just "remember" that you had them installed.

Mr. Incredible meme format where his face goes from happy to more and more concerned at each section. The text for each section is as follows:

Section 1;
Arch has the nvidia-open drivers now, dropping pascal support.

Section 2;
You still use a 10xx series nvidia card.

Section 3;
You forgot to install the legacy drivers and have already updated.

Section 4;
Your GUI doesn't show up anymore.

Section 5;
Installing the legacy drivers through TTY doesn't help.

top 67 comments

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[–] 95 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You need a couple things:

  • The kernel driver (dkms)
  • Userspace component
  • Kernel headers (for dkms)

First get your kernel headers, this is easy enough, but varies based on which kernel you have installed. The format of the package name is {kernel}-headers. If you have the linux kernel, get linux-headers. If you have linux-lts, get linux-lts-headers. If you're not sure on this, the command pacman -Q | grep linux searches for installed packages containing linux in the name. If you have multiple kernels installed, get the headers for all of them.

Then install (from AUR) at least nvidia-580xx-dkms (display out) and nvidia-580xx-utils (Acceleration, like 3D and video decoding). If you have Steam or play Windows games under Wine, be sure to get lib32-nvidia-580xx-utils too.

Also of note is the order in which you install things. Having the kernel headers installed is important for the DKMS modules to install succesfully. If you already have nvidia-580xx-dkms but were missing your kernel headers, you should reinstall it after installing your kernel headers.

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  • [–] 24 points 10 months ago

    I keep hitting my face on the fact that DKMS modules somehow don't depend on the kernel headers and these have to be installed manually. This happened to me both in Arch and in Debian.

    Why does everyone seem to think that this makes sense?

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  • [–] 63 points 10 months ago (14 children)

    RIP. Time to pull out the backup, amiright?

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  • [–] 110 points 10 months ago (12 children)
  • [–] 80 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    The backup specifically created for recovery…

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  • [–] 64 points 10 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    Blessed be CachyOS for setting that shit up for me automatically.

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  • [–] 16 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    While I agree snapper (what CachyOS uses) I very useful, it is important to draw a distinction between snapshots (snapper) and a proper backup tool (borg or restic). Snapshots are usually stored on the same drive, so in the event of a drive failure/corruption you are still very fucked. Proper backup programs also have other important features, like the ability to select remote locations, setup encryption, etc. DO NOT rely on snapper to (always) save your ass.

    That being said, I fucking love snapper and it was the main feature I was missing from openSUSE.

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  • [–] 18 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    You have btrfs and snapper, and just roll back to a working version in the grub menu, and install the legacy drivers before it all goes wrong

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  • [–] [S] 55 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I have ext4 and efistub, and the attention span of a squirrel.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    How do you roll back in the grub menu? Is that a feature of grub?

    When I update the kernel it replaces both options in systemd-boot so rolling back snapper is a scary endeavor due to kernel - system mismatchs

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  • [–] 18 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I just went over to NVK. I shouldn't really waste my time playing the graphic intensive games anyway. The indies are better.

    I tried dkms but it took so long to install I gave up.

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  • [–] 14 points 10 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] [S] 9 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    Already bought intel. I am quite fond of the B580.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Good, as long as you checked the driver situation beforehand right.... Right?

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    how is it? I heard it's a good hardware but terrible drivers, at least on windows. I don't know the state of intel GPU drivers on Linux.

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago

    Oh man, I remember fondly the days of booting to no gui. Typing out error codes to another computer to Google.

    I don't think I miss it. Linux has been super stable for me for a decade maybe, and I've been trying to game on it, so I used to have to fight with "faster" drivers all the time

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Is nouveau open source driver for nvidia actually good for such old gpus?

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (9 children)

    Boot into a live boot install of some distro on a USB drive.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 10 months ago (8 children)

    I did try that as well. The legacy drivers did install from the tty, still the system doesn't see them, for lack of a better word. It is not a big issue though. I had already planned on upgrading since my current setup is very old.

    Half of the new components have already arrived. The current PC will become a little home server running either Ubuntu or Debian most likely.

    I just thought the situation was funny.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    Did you also uninstall all of the components of the new driver as per the arch site?

    https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-driver-drops-pascal-support-main-packages-switch-to-open-kernel-modules/

    Otherwise it's investigate from the tty as to what driver, if any is in use for the gpu pci device.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 10 months ago (6 children)

    Yessir. I did remove everything that was from the 590 driver before I installed everything from the legacy 580xx. I might have to load a kernel module somewhere, maybe. But the effort is not worth the payout. My data on the machine itself is not unrecoverable thankfully.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    I have a 3080, so 590 is fine for me. But, I'm sure the legacy one is a dkms. But the process of installing that should be done as part of the install. E.g. you install, reboot

    What does lspci -k show for the card in terms of Kernel driver in use, and kernel modules? Also what does dkms status say?

    If the module is installed and showing in dkms status and showing as used in lspci -k, it should be available for desktop environments.

    I do agree in terms of effort when things go wrong though. I remember when I was a lot younger and I had no problems just sitting in front of my keyboard finding whatever the latest problem is. Now, I want to be doing things with my PC.

    But, a bit of debugging might be worthwhile before doing a new installation.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (4 children)

    I have never used Arch. And it may not be worthwhile for OP. But I am pretty confident that I could get that thing working again.

    Booting into a rescue live-boot distro on USB, mount the Arch root somewhere, bind-mounting /sys, /proc, and /dev from the host onto the Arch root, and then chrooting to a bash on the Arch root and you're basically in the child Arch environment and should be able to do package management, have DKMS work, etc.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    But, they shouldn't need rescue. The issue is no nvidia driver, but you can still login from the text terminals. Ctrl + Alt + F3, F4 etc etc. In fact when the window environment fails to load it should drop back to terminal.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, that's what I did. But it didn't drop to terminal because it was stuck on /dev/sda2: clean. At first I thought it hadn't booted at all. Frankly I think that was simply the last thing my monitor got from the GPU before it simply gave up. So i had to switch to TTY manually. That is my best guess.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Did you not see the news item you get before it allows you to start the update?

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    I was working on a little Intel NUC on the side that had memory issues. And during that I just sudo pacman -Syu on my main machine without thinking.

    I did also read the announcement before upgrading which makes it even better IMO.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Fair enough, I feel your pain. Hope that you had btrfs rollbacks available to you.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 10 months ago

    I use ext4, but the fix was just installing linux-headers. I simply was of the impression that I had already installed those. Most likely I had installed them on one of my laptops and simply just had that vivid memory still in my head. Once I installed them the problem solved itself after a reboot.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    What is the difference between arch drivers and say pop_os (my current daily)?

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago*

    Hey Look, it's me! I am on nobara against my fucking will. I spent all saturday screaming.

    I'm going to refer the shit out of this thread in my news battle to get my goddamn debian OS back. DNF is scary and I can't use signal.

    Here's my notes (WARNING: THESE NOTES LEAD TO FAILURE) :

    
    - get verson info for KDE and NVIDIA drivers
    https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//non-free-firmware/n/nvidia-graphics-drivers/nvidia-graphics-drivers_550.163.01-2_changelog
    https://packages.debian.org/trixie/nvidia-driver
    https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=nvidia&searchon=names&suite=trixie&section=all
    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17999695/debian-package-dependencies-installing-specific-version-not-the-latest
    
    
    added changes to /etc/apt/sources.list
    https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers?action=show&redirect=NVIDIA#Debian-13_notes
    
    2 - 16
    5 - 18
    8-17
    
    
    16 deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
    17 deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ trixie-security contrib non-free main non-free-firmware
    18 deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates non-free-firmware non-free contrib main
    
    2 deb http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie main (contrib) non-free-firmware
    5 deb http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie-updates main non-free-firmware (non-free contrib)
    8 deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ trixie-security (contrib) main non-free-firmware
    
    
    added git to /etc
    
    ran
      git config --global --add safe.directory /etc
    because I was geting thsi eror :
      fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at '/etc'
      To add an exception for this directory, call:
    
    installing drivers
      https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers?action=show&redirect=NVIDIA#Debian-13_notes
        apt install nvidia-kernel-dkms nvidia-driver
    
    
        WARNING: No kernel headers were found, skipping module build.
                 To get the headers for the running kernel (6.12.57+deb13-amd64)
                 please install the linux-headers-6.12.57+deb13-amd64 package.
       ran
            apt install linux-headers-generic
       to resolve
    
       I DID ACTUALL RUN THE FOLLOWING
       _____
       Post-installation steps for Trixie
    
        Optionally verify the result of the DKMS module compilation:
    
        # dkms status
    
        If you plan to use wayland (which is a default for both the Gnome and KDE Plasma desktops since Debian 12 "Bookworm") make sure to follow the Wayland Modesetting notes below.
    
            If gnome starts with X11, you may enable wayland support by enabling NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 as mentioned below.
    
            If you plan to use suspend/hibernate functionality under KDE desktop environment, you may want to add another option to avoid graphics "glitches" after wakeup/restore:
            Warning: skip this step if you have Optimus hybrid graphics
    
            # echo "options nvidia NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1" >> /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-options.conf
    
        In most cases a restart of the system is recommended to fully load the new driver. For wayland, check again if modeset is properly set, as described above.
    
        _____https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers?action=show&redirect=NVIDIA#Wayland_configuration and this wayland shit too
        _____
    
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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    Did you uninstall the official driver first? That is, the nvidia package?

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    I'm safe, my ThinkPad doesn't have an iGPU, and there's no instructions on how to solder one onto an L440 motherboard.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago

    Modern schoolkids don't read, so Arch should consider making 20-minute videos for every update. And a song like some of the *BSD.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    @KuzhinierSileon no video moment

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Omg I remember running into something like this about 12 years ago. TTY did help but did need a reboot. I had to arch-chroot off the live usb so many times that night, my first ever Linux installation and I fucked up the bootloader and initial packages so hard so many times. I felt so cool when I was able to switch to another tty without needing yet another usb boot. Thanks for that memory.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Using arch is the first mistake.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] -1 points 10 months ago

    (shrugs) I haven't had an issue with my 1050ti or 4070 on Mint MATE. I did have issues with my AMD Phantom 2. YMMV

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  • [–] -2 points 10 months ago

    If you use arch and managing nvidia is hard you shouldn't have picked arch

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