According to Phoronix, Arch Linux has officially transitioned its main repository NVIDIA driver packages to use the company’s open kernel modules. This change is tied to the update to driver version 590, which, as NVIDIA announced, drops support for Pascal architecture GPUs like the GTX 10xx series and anything older. The distribution is directly replacing the ‘nvidia’ package with ‘nvidia-open’ and doing the same for the ‘nvidia-dkms’ and ‘nvidia-lts’ packages. The immediate impact is severe for users with those older cards: updating will break the graphical environment because the new driver simply won’t load. For those users, manual intervention is required—they must uninstall the standard packages and install the ‘nvidia-580xx-dkms’ driver from the Arch User Repository (AUR). Meanwhile, users with Turing (20xx series) and newer GPUs will get the open modules automatically with no action needed.
The Open vs. Proprietary Shift
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just Arch being Arch. It’s following NVIDIA’s own roadmap. The open kernel modules are NVIDIA’s attempt to play nicer with the Linux ecosystem, making the driver easier to debug and integrate. But there’s a catch, and the Pascal cutoff is it. NVIDIA is drawing a line in the sand, and a major rolling release distro like Arch isn’t going to maintain legacy proprietary blobs in its main repos. So they’re pushing everyone forward—or forcing a subset of users backward to a community-maintained legacy package. It’s a clean break, which is very Arch, but also a stark reminder of how hardware support in Linux often hinges on corporate whims. Is this the future for all distros? Probably, but they’ll move much slower.
Winners and Losers
So who wins? Users with modern NVIDIA cards get a slightly more transparent driver that’s potentially more stable with new kernel versions. The open-source purists get a small win, seeing a proprietary blob get a bit more open. And the Arch community that maintains the AUR steps up to support the abandoned hardware. The clear losers are owners of still-very-capable GTX 1060s and 1080s. They’re now second-class citizens, dependent on an AUR package that might not get the same level of testing or timely updates. It fragments the user experience. And for industrial or embedded systems using older NVIDIA GPUs for compute or display? This kind of forced obsolescence is a headache. Speaking of industrial tech, when reliability and long-term driver support are non-negotiable, many turn to dedicated suppliers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs that often manage these support cycles for their customers.
The Bigger Picture
Look, this is a microcosm of a constant battle in Linux. Progress versus stability. New features versus long-term support. Arch chooses progress, always. But this move highlights a growing chasm between the “open” driver effort and true, community-driven open-source. NVIDIA’s open kernel modules are still proprietary at their core; they’re just packaged differently. The real freedom would be Nouveau, but without GPU re-clocking support, it’s mostly useless for performance. So users are stuck choosing between two NVIDIA-controlled options: the new open-ish one or the old legacy one. It’s a managed transition, not a liberation. And for the average user with an older card, the message is pretty clear: it might be time to think about an upgrade, or switch to AMD where the open-source driver situation is genuinely better. Isn’t that what NVIDIA probably wants anyway?
