If you are using Nvidia Pascal architecture (GeForce GTX 10-serie, Quadro P-serie (P2000, P5000, P6000) en Tesla P100) and recently updated your system, you probably have encountered disproportionate graphics (nvidia-open) or perhaps you’ve been experimenting with other distro’s like Manjaro and had to deal with 85-95% performance loss (Noveau).
I am not by any means a smart or technical person, but after FAFO’ing around for the last 2 weeks, I have found a reasonable solution to the matter. I made a little instruction.pdf to get EndeavourOS back to working on the original / previous driver and I just made an account to share this for whoever is facing the same issues as I have over the last 2 weeks.
Re-rolling the system back prior to nvidia driver changes: My approach is based on an offline installation of the EndervourOS 2025.11.24 ISO, then manually IgnorePkg through “-edit pacman config” in the command line to prevent any specifically related nvidia packages from upgrading to nvidia-open or noveau, without compromising on any other important updates. The only downside to this solution is that you will no longer be getting any kernel or driver updates. If you still want to be able to utilize your GPU performance and don’t mind the kernel or driver updates. Just make a fresh clean offline Installation of EndervourOS 2025.11.24 version and follow the instructions in the pdf file. It should be pretty straight forward: https://drive.proton.me/urls/JFRMRM1DC8#i0Row6kKfKLV
Thank you for your response. Installing the 580xx nvidia drivers from the AUR was the first thing I tried before coming to this solution. It ended up breaking a chain-link in dependencies bricking my entire system. After that I wasn’t even able to reinstall EndevourOS from the boatloader and had to temporarily switch to Manjaro before being able to come back to EndevourOS. I am unsure for how long my option is viable and I specifically wrote this for people that do not have the expertise to manually fix the 580xx nvidia route. But in general linux systems tends to operational for a long time even if you are not maintaining your updates. Regardless of not being the best option out there, it does fix my problem of either having to deal with noveau, nividia-open or the 580xx legacy drivers.
This is not true for rolling release distros like ours. In a system like yours where you hold back packages, it becomes hard to install newer packages which are built on new libraries/packages
This is correct. If you do not update your system for a long enough period of time this is a risk. However my current solution only prevents the kernel and driver from updating automatically to the ones that are currently not working. You can use sudo pacman -Syu to maintain the other packages. If any future update would break a dependency related to the kernel + Driver it will let you know in the terminal. As of now this is not the case, and as for how long this grace period will be, it still is a temporary bridge to use my system the way i want to use it.
Well, that decision by nVidia was announced as early as of July this year and they stated back then that until October that change won’t happen. We already had the discussions here in the forum from the potential affected users who anticipated the major driver update to the 590 version way earlier than the actual release one month ago.
And as they driver branch essentially will get security related updates nonetheless, it’s just the so called game ready driver support, it has been the decision of the Arch devs to only maintain nvidia-open in the official repositories. Which is, from my point of view, a logical and reasonable choice. As it’s simply inefficient to maintain two different driver versions.
From my point of view, it’s not the Arch team to blame for that decision. It’s nvidias corporate policy and their mess in terms of providing two different driver branches (the proprietary driver and the “open kernel modules” which are still not completely open source. Their decision to drop game ready driver support for older cards is effectively a different discussion and I don’t see a reason why they should provide full feature support for cards that are definitely beyond their prime..
Which is definitely not the best approach. As you would miss out on the security related updates to the 580 driver branch the Maxwell, Pascal & Volta series of nVidia GPUs will still receive via the AUR package nvidia-580xx-dkms.
It’s a temporary “limbo” state you’ve chosen. You’re essentially postponing the switch and opted that your future self would tackle that issue at a later point in time.
Thanks for taking the time to write, your insightful comment on the matter is appreciated. Nvidia’s announcement passed me and it appears I am not the only one regarding this matter. I imagine it being somewhat a niche of a problem in regards of the community that is actually affected, but it is rather frustrating how unbeknownst, a single update can quite literally break havoc to your system.
I am no expert on the matter but the migration wasn’t really a smooth sailing. The Ferris wheel of trial and error made me try and figure out what was happening as I got abruptly struck in my workflow. After multiple attempts to get the 580xx nvidia drivers to work still failing, I decided to switch distro’s to have a functioning UI but still having GPU performance loss issues was rather frustrating.
I am not really trying to point fingers as I stand by the famous “quote” by Linus Torvalds against corporate greed. You are right about the temporary limbo state I have chosen as I hope migration will hopefully become more smooth onward, at least in regards to the 580xx nvidia drivers. And if not I can tackle it sometime else when I am not pressured while being dependent on my system for my workflows.
Nonetheless my title was pretty straight forward.
Easy temporary solution for the recent no longer supported Nvidia drivers
I’ll edit the title and add ‘’if you cant get 580xx to work”
It is pretty easy to do this and we have several posts explaining the process. It is honestly far simpler than what you have posted. I understand you had some trouble with it but we would be glad to help you get on the right path with it.
Having one of these Gpu (GTX 1060) that are no longer supported I can assure you that installing the 580xx version is the right solution. I had absolutely no issues doing just that. Matter of fact I purposely installed the nvidia-open 590xx version drivers to show why they don’t work on Gpu’s that are not Turing or higher. I had no issues to reinstall the 580xx version. Nothing broken, nothing bricked. I would not follow this as it is not the way to fix the issue that one may have on their hardware.
I was trying to use the 580xx packages for a GTX 1080 system. ‘steam’ whines that the nvidia utils package must be installed, and it simply won’t accept the 580xx version of that package. Am I missing something?
resolving dependencies... :: There are 10 providers available for lib32-vulkan-driver: :: Repository multilib 1) lib32-nvidia-utils 2) lib32-vulkan-asahi 3) lib32-vulkan-dzn 4) lib32-vulkan-freedreno 5) lib32-vulkan-gfxstream 6) lib32-vulkan-intel 7) lib32-vulkan-nouveau 8) lib32-vulkan-radeon 9) lib32-vulkan-swrast 10) lib32-vulkan-virtio Enter a number (default=1): looking for conflicting packages... :: nvidia-utils-590.48.01-1and nvidia-580xx-utils-580.119.02-2 are in conflict (nvidia-libgl). Remove nvidia-580xx-utils? [y/N]
It doesn’t seem like Steam offers an alternative choice that recognizes the mixed options.
Thanks to the clue from @MichelN, installing lib32-nvidia-580xx-utils got me sorted, though. I don’t think I’d have found that myself. I had installed nvidia-580xx-dkms and nvidia-utils-580xx myself already manually - this lib32 component missed my attention.
