Hi,
In short, I’ve decommissioned my old Nvidia GPU for a 9070 XT.
While the 9070 works fine as it is currently, I figured it would be wise to clean up the old nvidia drivers.
So my line of thought was to use sudo pacman -Ss nvidia | egrep -i installed to gather a list of currently installed nvidia packages and remove them one by one.
However there are a few that I’m struggling to remove and would like some guidance.
[matcha@matcha-machine ~]$ sudo pacman -Ss nvidia | grep -A1 installed
extra/egl-gbm 1.1.2.1-1 [installed]
The GBM EGL external platform library
extra/egl-wayland 4:1.1.19-1 [installed]
EGLStream-based Wayland external platform
extra/egl-x11 1.0.1-1 [installed]
NVIDIA XLib and XCB EGL Platform Library
--
extra/libvdpau 1.5-3 [installed]
Nvidia VDPAU library
--
extra/nvidia-utils 570.144-3 [installed]
NVIDIA drivers utilities
--
multilib/lib32-nvidia-utils 570.144-1 [installed]
NVIDIA drivers utilities (32-bit)
Below are examples of the errors I’m seeing:
[matcha@matcha-machine ~]$ sudo pacman -Rs nvidia-utils
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing nvidia-utils breaks dependency 'nvidia-utils=570.144' required by lib32-nvidia-utils
[matcha@matcha-machine ~]$ sudo pacman -Rs libvdpau
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing libvdpau breaks dependency 'libvdpau' required by ffmpeg
:: removing libvdpau breaks dependency 'libvdpau' required by ffmpeg4.4
:: removing libvdpau breaks dependency 'libvdpau' required by mpv
[matcha@matcha-machine ~]$ sudo pacman -Rs egl-x11
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing egl-x11 breaks dependency 'egl-x11' required by nvidia-utils
I stumbled across a thread where we could use -Rsc to remove packages that are dependent…but I think its odd that I’d have to remove steam for example..to remove an nvidia driver but perhaps I’m still accustomed to the “windows” way of thought.
[matcha@matcha-machine ~]$ sudo pacman -Rsc nvidia-utils
checking dependencies...
:: ffmpeg optionally requires nvidia-utils: Nvidia NVDEC/NVENC support
:: ffmpeg4.4 optionally requires nvidia-utils: Nvidia NVDEC/NVENC support
:: htop optionally requires lsof: show files opened by a process
:: libvdpau optionally requires nvidia-utils: driver for NVIDIA
:: sdl3 optionally requires vulkan-driver: vulkan renderer
:: vulkan-icd-loader optionally requires vulkan-driver: packaged vulkan driver
warning: dependency cycle detected:
warning: eglexternalplatform will be removed after its nvidia-utils dependency
warning: dependency cycle detected:
warning: lib32-libglvnd will be removed after its lib32-nvidia-utils dependency
warning: dependency cycle detected:
warning: lib32-mesa will be removed after its lib32-libglvnd dependency
warning: dependency cycle detected:
warning: lib32-harfbuzz will be removed after its lib32-freetype2 dependency
warning: dependency cycle detected:
warning: lib32-pam will be removed after its lib32-systemd dependency
Package (65) Old Version Net Change
egl-gbm 1.1.2.1-1 -0.03 MiB
egl-wayland 4:1.1.19-1 -0.10 MiB
egl-x11 1.0.1-1 -0.14 MiB
eglexternalplatform 1.2.1-1 -0.02 MiB
lib32-alsa-lib 1.2.14-1 -1.00 MiB
lib32-alsa-plugins 1.2.12-1 -0.27 MiB
lib32-audit 4.0.3-1 -0.12 MiB
lib32-bzip2 1.0.8-4 -0.07 MiB
lib32-dbus 1.16.2-1 -0.32 MiB
lib32-expat 2.7.1-1 -0.17 MiB
lib32-fontconfig 2:2.16.2-1 -0.32 MiB
lib32-freetype2 2.13.3-3 -0.76 MiB
lib32-glib2 2.84.1-1 -3.70 MiB
lib32-harfbuzz 11.2.0-1 -2.46 MiB
lib32-icu 76.1-1 -36.37 MiB
lib32-json-c 0.18-1 -0.08 MiB
lib32-libcap 2.76-1 -0.09 MiB
lib32-libdrm 2.4.124-1 -0.35 MiB
lib32-libelf 0.193-1 -2.59 MiB
lib32-libffi 3.4.8-1 -0.03 MiB
lib32-libgcrypt 1.11.0-1 -1.02 MiB
lib32-libglvnd 1.7.0-1 -1.33 MiB
lib32-libgpg-error 1.51-1 -0.15 MiB
lib32-libnm 1.52.0-1 -1.38 MiB
lib32-libnsl 2.0.1-1 -0.03 MiB
lib32-libpciaccess 0.18.1-1 -0.04 MiB
lib32-libpipewire 1:1.4.2-1 -0.86 MiB
lib32-libpng 1.6.48-1 -0.28 MiB
lib32-libtasn1 4.20.0-1 -0.08 MiB
lib32-libtirpc 1.3.6-1 -0.17 MiB
lib32-libva 2.22.0-1 -0.27 MiB
lib32-libx11 1.8.12-1 -1.28 MiB
lib32-libxau 1.0.11-2 -0.01 MiB
lib32-libxcb 1.17.0-1 -1.03 MiB
lib32-libxcrypt-compat 4.4.38-1 -0.17 MiB
lib32-libxdmcp 1.1.5-1 -0.02 MiB
lib32-libxext 1.3.6-1 -0.08 MiB
lib32-libxfixes 6.0.1-2 -0.02 MiB
lib32-libxinerama 1.1.5-2 -0.01 MiB
lib32-libxml2 2.14.2-2 -1.21 MiB
lib32-libxshmfence 1.3.3-1 -0.01 MiB
lib32-libxss 1.2.4-2 -0.01 MiB
lib32-libxxf86vm 1.1.5-2 -0.02 MiB
lib32-llvm-libs 1:19.1.7-2 -154.69 MiB
lib32-lm_sensors 1:3.6.0.r41.g31d1f125-3 -0.05 MiB
lib32-mesa 1:25.0.5-1 -103.21 MiB
lib32-ncurses 6.5-1 -0.56 MiB
lib32-nspr 4.36-1 -0.26 MiB
lib32-nss 3.111-1 -3.00 MiB
lib32-nvidia-utils 570.144-1 -246.47 MiB
lib32-p11-kit 0.25.5-1 -2.73 MiB
lib32-pam 1.7.0-1 -0.75 MiB
lib32-pcre2 10.45-1 -1.80 MiB
lib32-pipewire 1:1.4.2-1 -4.67 MiB
lib32-spirv-tools 1:1.4.309.0-1 -5.82 MiB
lib32-sqlite 3.49.1-1 -1.44 MiB
lib32-systemd 257.5-1 -2.44 MiB
lib32-util-linux 2.41-1 -1.06 MiB
lib32-vulkan-icd-loader 1.4.309.0-1 -0.55 MiB
lib32-wayland 1.23.1-1 -0.16 MiB
lib32-xz 5.8.1-1 -0.21 MiB
libxcrypt-compat 4.4.38-1 -0.17 MiB
lsof 4.99.4-1 -0.36 MiB
steam 1.0.0.82-2 -18.65 MiB
nvidia-utils 570.144-3 -789.44 MiB
Total Removed Size: 1396.98 MiB
:: Do you want to remove these packages? [Y/n]
Thanks for taking the time to read this and thank you in advance!