All my machines still work after a decade or two. As time goes on, the opensource drivers for old cards gets more reliable.

My partners PC recently had its GPU go "unsupported" by nvidia, but it works just fine with the driver that now supports it.

Nvidia will stop supporting the card officially around the same time on both platforms. With Linux, a viable open source driver may exist in the future, as there is work on nvk which should support that generation of card.

Not same but last year Linux kernel officially dropped support for Pentium CPUs after 28years so I guess you are good for another 18 years

I’m running a 1060 from 12 years ago or more with Linix Mint on my desktop and it’s had no issues keeping up with drivers. That thing still shocks me with what it can pull off without even breaking a sweat. It’s hard to say what things will look like, as a whole, ten years from now, but considering I can still get updated drivers for a 300 series on a hobby rig I like to fuck with (it can run Borderlands 2, on high, what the fuck?!) I don’t think you have anything to stress about.

It will TECHNICALLY still work at whatever version Nvidia cuts off support at, which is pretty soon for GTX cards (they've already cut off the mobile counterparts). So you'll stop getting updates, but it should still work as long as that driver is made available still in some form that whatever distro you are using can install it, or you compile it from scratch. I would not trust Nvidia's installer to still be working by then in it's current form because it's a MESS.

I use Linux on hardware older and less capable than yours, and usually the only real show-stopper I find is a lack of Vulkan support. I don't use any nVidia hardware, but my understanding is that older chips are supported decently by current Linux drivers. So I'd say you'll probably be fine.

As for ten years from now, it's uncommon for Linux software to remove features, and even if it happens, there's virtually always a way for you stay on an old version if you really need to, because there are no forced updates. If you're careful you can sometimes even keep the old versions of things for old software that needs it, while still having the latest version for software that can use it.

My GTX 1060 just stopped receiving feature updates in november but it's still supported with bug fixes and it is a GPU from 2016. There is a good chance your GTX 1650 will be supported for the next 10 years since the architecture is new enough to use the latest RTX drivers

I would be less concerned about the GPU driver and more about the entire distro. Like most distros, Ubuntu has a release cycle where versions of everything are deprecated over time in favour of newer ones, and to expect that the entire OS will be fully supported in 10 years may be asking a bit much (I'm not sure if even their LTS release goes that far).

On top of that, Ubuntu could go bankrupt or get bought out, or simply enshittify (more than it already has) in that time. Expecting Ubuntu specifically to be supported on your laptop in ten years is anyone's guess.

However, what you can be reasonably sure of is that Linux will continue to support your system, GPU and all, for a very long time. I heard a kernel developer once say that due to the kernel's modular design, there's support in there for stuff just one or two people in the whole world use.

As someone else has already pointed out, FOSS support for hardware generally gets better over time, and a GTX video card is ubiquitous. There's going to be a hell of a lot of those floating around on laptops, servers, and homelabs for a lot more than ten years.

You just might not be able to stick with Ubuntu. The older the hardware, the more you might have to lean toward the more technical distros that make it easy to customise the kernel or that favour old hardware. I like Gentoo for this job, but even Ubuntu or Debian have paths to do compile your own kernel for example.

My 2008 laptop runs Arch quite happily, interestingly enough (arch btw)

I don't know the situation with Ubuntu, but on Arch Linux older Nvidia drivers are available as legacy driver DKMS modules working with the current kernel and tools.

So basically: Yes, this will work on a technical level.

My 1080 is supported by one of the legacy driver packages and is roughly 10 years old now.

I am pretty sure something similar exists for Ubuntu.