This isn’t a guide, just something i think may help. To install Steam on an Arch-based distro in most of the cases a simple sudo pacman -S steam will do just fine.

The installation will ask you to select a valid vulkan package from a list. And in most of the cases that’s just fine… most of them.

Then you have your very “picky” old nvidia GPU which works only with a specific old nvidia driver and if you try to install anything else, there will be a conflict. Now you can try to remove the old (working) drivers and try your luck. But looking online i find a simple way to skip this passage and install Steam.

sudo pacman -S steam --assume-installed lib32-vulkan-driver

  • kinther@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    This is one of the reasons I went with AMD for my latest GPU. Not that NVIDIA sucks, I just didnt want the hassle.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      25·
      3 days ago

      let’s not act like massive multinational corporations care about us, AMD is also ethically miserable, as is intel and everyone else.

      • nothingcorporate@lemmy.todayEnglish
        23·
        3 days ago

        There’s a big difference between “there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism,” and “these guys are making autonomous killing machines carrying out a genocide.”

        I’m not pro-corporate anybody (see username), but if we can’t stick up a big middle finger to genocide profiteers, to whom can we?

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          that’s not what i’m saying though: what i’m saying is that AMD and intel aren’t any different from nvidia, they’re all the same shitheads that are happy to pretend they’re pro-consumer and not evil when they have the excuse of being the underdog.

          There are companies that try to not be evil (or at least minimally evil as required by capitalism) but AMD isn’t one of them. Go support RISC-V and openpower instead.

  • InvisibleShoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    4 days ago

    Haha I just spent the last 2 days trying to get nvidia to work on arch. Its my first time using arch but I did end up getting the drivers to work by removing the default one and installing the dkms drivers. Still a pain in the ass though.

    • InvisibleShoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      I have a GTX 980 Ti, so this is interesting. After toying with Arch for the past few days, I’m considering switching to AMD in the near future.

    • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      This is funny because I recently retired my 750ti which I had been using for server work and it ran great with the latest Nvidia driver (although I heard they’re gonna drop support soon and move the driver into a legacy package on rpmfusion).

      The poor thing couldn’t even do H.265, had 2 Gb of VRAM, and needed specially compiled libraries for pytorch/tensorflow stuff because CM 5.0 was over 10 years ago, but it chugged along just fine.

      I’m personally still on a 1660ti because despite OpenCL’s best efforts, CUDA has everyone by the balls, but now that I have a beefier server setup, I’ll probably go with AMD on my next build.

      Assuming I’ll actually want to make a new build with these insane prices lol.

      • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Soon? Support for Kepler was dropped years ago. Driver version 470 is the last one that supports the 700 series.

        • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          750 specifically was special because it was Maxwell architecture that Nvidia used on an “old” GPU brand line.

          Hence the CM 5.0 instead of 3.0.

          Mine was on the 580 something driver with CUDA 13.2 when I removed it from my server a couple of weeks ago.

          • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            Oh! That’s cool then. 580 is the last version that supports Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta, latest is 595. But yeah there were still releases in the 580 driver branch as recently as last month. So that’s cool.

  • yuman@programming.devEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    anyone knows what kinda driver that isn’t nouveau works for a GT750M? @mlg@lemmy.world which did you use for your 750ti?

    got a Macbook Pro 2013 motherboard (i7-4850, 16 GB DDR3, GT750M 2 GB) that I’m thinking of turning into a desktop. no gaming intended, although welcome if possible (old titles).

  • Stupendous@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    I get if you’re buying 5080 and up hardware, there’s no other competitors there. 5070 and lower, buy AMD or Intel. 9070 (xt) are great graphics cards. The 9060xt is great. You can go down to 7600xt, A770, B580, etc and have a graphics card very capable of gaming and they work straight out the box. No proprietary driver frictions. I use a 9070. I’ll be good for another 5+ years. GPU upgrade. Maybe a CPU upgrade since I’m AM5 based. No motherboard/memory changes and considering the next consoles are likely to be based on Zen 6, I’ll be right with them just with a stronger CPU

    • Tiral@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      I love my 9600xt. 16gb of ram is more than it will ever need. Also getting the same performance as my 6800xt at about 30-40% of the power, the fans barely turn on.

  • typhoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    82·
    3 days ago

    I’m lucky that I have the benefit to choose and can use another GPU brand that is open source and integrated to the kernel.

  • Brewchin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    On my desktop with a 2060 it’s zero issue, but on my 940M hybrid video laptop it’s been spicy at times.

    Usually updates without an issue, and the most I need to do is delay the -settings package update until after the rest. (IIRC, see what I mean 😄).

  • A Sharky Anthro@fedia.io
    5·
    3 days ago

    LOL Oofta, that was me years ago fighting for my life on an NVIDIA optimus GPU and trying to game on Linux. Total shitshow, I might have to abandon NVIDIA with my next upgrade when the prices come down, AMD is a bit better on Linux (my Ryzen is thriving and surviving on Garuda Linux). Can’t wait to get a full AMD build and not have to worry about NVIDIA making things weird.

  • snoons@lemmy.caEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    I have to reinstall the driver for my ancient 1070Ti pretty much every update.

    • Jo4ted@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      Interesting. My 1070ti works fine after every update. I switched to CachyOS after it lost mainstream support, so maybe it’s that? Idk. Best of luck figuring that out, though, sounds awful.

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Maybe dkms isn’t automatically building?

      And yeah, like Jo4 suggested… you should try Cachy. Support is way better than stock Arch because all that is preconfigured.

  • yesman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    I suppose I’m lucky. Catchy installed the Nvidia driver during the install and works/ updates without issue. I’ve got an older card, but not ancient. gtx1660

    I did have issues when I first switched to Linux, but that was on Debian.

    • Tim_Bisley@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Cach6 was the smoothest experience for me. It can be difficult with other wldistros and also with cach6 probably.

    • NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Cachy kept freezing on me as did many other distros I was using. I found the common reason was due to Wayland and I’ve been on Linux Mint Cinnamon ever since with no issues like that. RTX 4080 Super

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        How recent was this? Cinammon only just got experimental Wayland support, AFAIK. Like, a month or two ago?

        And Cachy KDE Nvidia Wayland was jank for a while (hence it defaulted to X11), but it works fine for me, for now.

        • NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          I made this change like back in December or so. I had been distro hopping since moving to Linux in August of last year and was on a ton of distros with KDE that all had Wayland.

          I moved to Mint Cinnamon because it seemed to be one of the few that wasn’t using Wayland and my issues stopped. I believe they did have experimental Wayland on one of the versions and I made sure not to use that one since I was under the impression it was due to Wayland and remember trying to decide between the other options they had.

  • michaelmrose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Nvidia supports 13 year old hardware and newest kernels with 580. At some point when running your 14 year old GPU one might consider just running the open source nouveau after all I assume that if you are running a 14 year old GPU you probably don’t need the utmost possible performance or you might consider getting a 4 year old AMD for $100 to replace your 14 year old nvidia.

    Whilst it would be ideal for you not to have to look up anything ever nvidia will tell you which driver to use with your hardware

    https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/drivers/

    If you are feeling frisky you could synthesize the already available data into a script that tells you the same thing. Linux Mint has a GUI for this which tells you which version is recommended for your hardware and your total commitment is clicking install and rebooting.