back to article Ubuntu upgrade had our old Nvidia GPU begging for a downgrade

The Reg FOSS desk spent some quality time downgrading Ubuntu to restore graphics acceleration. How and why would we do this? Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble" is a long-term support version, and back in September it got its first point release. One of the biggest Ubuntu downstreams, Linux Mint, just put out its first point release to its …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Linux is forever?

    As much as I would love to switch to Linux and leave Windows behind (a lot!), this article captures exactly why I won't. Linux cannot and will not win hearts and minds while some driver updates are this challenging. Nvidia and other companies need to "want it" as much as we do.

    1. JimmyPage
      Unhappy

      Re: Linux is forever?

      It's a catch-22.

      Companies won't write drivers for Linux because it's not so widespread.

      Linux isn't so widespread because companies won't write drivers.

      1. kmorwath

        Re: Linux is forever?

        Actually, in this case there are nVidia Linux drivers, but:

        - Proprietary ones are evil, as the Book of Linux says, so true believers keep them away

        - Linux doesn't care about binary backwards compatibility, because of course you can recompile everything yourself.

        That happens when an OS is designed by academic guys with their heads deeeply stuck in 1970s California sands...

        We really need an OS for 2025 onwards - but there is none, especially now there's no money that could be made with a new OS (unless you're Apple and fully control the hardware too).

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          Re: Linux is forever?

          I have to disagree. The better options do exist, and it was academics that built them.

          What we have here is the freebie community recreation, by hackers and pesky kids.

      2. frankvw
        Linux

        Re: Linux is forever?

        "Companies won't write drivers for Linux because it's not so widespread. Linux isn't so widespread because companies won't write drivers."

        While this is entirely true, NVidia has long since been the enfant terrible of Linux drivers. The thing is, a company that size with their resources could easily perform proper driver maintenance and provide at least reasonable support, including reasonable legacy support, in some shape or form to most of the Linux market. But they don't. So either they consider it not worth their while (which seems rather shortsighted given the number of Linux users who would like to use Nvidia hardware) or they feel their interests (i.e. bottom line) are better served by deliberately limiting their Linux support efforts.

        As things currently stand most Linux users are pragmatic enough to accept drivers in the form of proprietary binaries, so any fears on the part of Nvidia that Linux drivers might divulge proprietary technology to the Great Unwashed seem rather silly. As another poster has already pointed out, AMD seems do be doing just fine.

        So NVidia is the problem here, rather than the idea that Linux requires Deep Wizardry in order to get hardware to work.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Linux is forever?

      This wasn't a "driver update". The driver is specifically not being updated since support has been discontinued. This was a new operating system version, which essentially wasn't compatible with the hardware in question. I imagine you'd have even more trouble trying to install the latest Windows 11 on a computer from 2011!

      And to your point, there's a reason AMD graphics cards now have a comparatively larger market share among desktop Linux users!

    3. Bryan W

      Re: Linux is forever?

      This breakage is caused by Nvidia doing just that?

      But, yea, I get it. You need a certain level of expertise with PCs in general to tolerate a Linux daily driver. Being a willfully ignorant user still doesn't fly no matter how "easy" distros try to make it.

    4. AdamWill

      Re: Linux is forever?

      Just don't buy NVIDIA. This has been the appropriate advice for Linux forever and remains so at least until nvk is fully ready.

      nvk is now probably more or less workable if you have the right hardware ("Turing (RTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later"). It's still missing raytracing, which is kinda a big deal for high-end gaming, but it's much less of a pain to work with than the proprietary driver.

      Yes, this is a problem if you want a really high-end gaming system, as AMD doesn't have anything that competes with NVIDIA at the really high end (and, as noted, nvk is not fully equivalent to the Windows driver yet). But for anything AMD covers, just buy a fricking AMD card, it will just work with none of the proprietary driver PITAs. (Or at the lower end maybe one of the new Intel ones, they seem to be actually good!)

      NVIDIA does do the same thing on Windows: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/01/nvidia-winding-down-support-for-older-gpus-including-the-legendary-750-ti-and-1060/ and https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-drops-kepler-windows-7-8-8.1-support/ . I think the cutoffs are actually quite similar - basically anything before Maxwell is on a legacy driver, on Windows and Linux. On Windows, the I can't quite tell if this is done more aggressively on Linux than on Windows, it's hard to figure. It seems that for Linux the 'legacy' cutoff is currently Maxwell - Maxwell and later are supported in the current driver, anything before Maxwell is in a legacy driver.

      However, it does seem like they keep the legacy driver available for newer Windows releases, to some extent, which is significantly different. Though it looks like Windows 11 cuts off support for anything pre-Fermi: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/o7ymr9/nvidia_gpus_that_will_no_longer_work_on_windows_11/

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Linux is forever?

        > Just don't buy NVIDIA. This has been the appropriate advice for Linux forever ...

        Anybody else remember the "forcedeth" driver module? I only had a brief experience with a set of hardware which had those nvidia bits on it, but it was not one I'd care to repeat.

    5. nightflier

      Re: Linux is forever?

      I had a totally different upgrade experience, a Windows 7 laptop that, after upgrading to Windows 10, would not use a display resolution beyond XGA. Even hours of professional support didn't help. Upgraded to Kubuntu and everything worked correctly. FHD display, wireless, sound, without any fiddling.

  2. nematoad Silver badge
    Unhappy

    A nightmare.

    What a fankle!

    The OP is partially right in saying that this sort of thing will put off many people wanting to try Linux. However, what Liam is writing about is getting into "advanced" territory and is, in my experience, a consequence of Nvidia's attitude to the status of its drivers. Being proprietary is a recipe for frustration, inconvenience and outright bloody-mindedness.

    I too was once bitten by the curse of Nvidia drivers. I wasted a lot of time trying to get the driver to work as Nouveau was not cutting it. In the end I just switched to AMD/Radeon and have never had a single problem since.

    Not much consolation for those poor souls stuck with an integrated Nvidia GPU and if that is the case you are just going to have to follow Mr. Proven's steps and get into the nitty-gritty of video card drivers.

    The very best of luck.

    1. Triggerfish

      Re: A nightmare.

      While it might be advanced territory, the commonest of nvidia chips out there means it surely catches out a lot of people. Most of the not advanced users, or wanting to go through hardware changes.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A nightmare.

      Don't forget the newer drivers breaking things that worked with the older drivers. I'm specifically remembering the shadow-on-the-floor puzzle in Uru that I couldn't solve; turns out my up-to-date drivers weren't rendering the shadows, so I had to revert to older ones just to get it to work.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A nightmare.

      Thumbs up'd for "fankle". Thanks for that one....

  3. Natalie Gritpants Jr

    Nvidia chips soldered to a motherboard means that motherboard is on my do-not-buy list, same as Realtek network chips

    1. kmorwath

      How many laptops do you see with a GPU or CPU non soldered to the motherboard? And many low-ends PCs, or small-factor ones, use soldered chips. So basically only desktops PCs have PCIe video cards... today, a minority.

      1. Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

        Many high end laptops have the discrete video card as a plug in module but it's not like you can replace that with an AMD or higher end NVIDIA because most of the time the form factor is different!

        But yeah, if you have thin and light, well, you're screwed!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I haven't had issues with Realtek, and it's not like Intel doesn't have problems, especially on Linux with wifi if you want to use software APs.

  4. kmorwath

    Good article on the same page why everybody should move to Linux, which if "forever".

    Thirty years later, Linux still have issues with hardware. Because it can't be compatible with itself - and proprietary drivers are evil. These are the issues that blocks its adotpion as a desktop system. An average user would have an hard time to fix such issue. But those are not the Linux customers.

    PS: it is true Windows is trying to gain parity with Linux creating issues with hardware with each update. Probably it relies on many of the same developers, now that Nadella is cutting costs.

    1. frankvw
      Facepalm

      Re: Good article on the same page why everybody should move to Linux, which if "forever".

      "proprietary drivers are evil"

      BS. Most of us will happily run proprietary / closed source drivers. The point is that in this case those drivers are not being maintained properly by Nvidia, so that yesterday's Nvidia hardware has no working driver for today's Linux. That is the problem here.

      Many other hardware vendors manage just fine when it comes to maintaining drivers for older products. In fact, legacy hardware as a general rule works more often with current versions of Linux than with current versions of Windows.

      Not so with Nvidia...

  5. Luiz Abdala
    Windows

    Live CD?

    Isn't a live CD option possible? Try the new kernel from a USB stick, see that it borks your GPU drivers and offers no other drivers, simply reboot without stick.

    Isn't that the whole idea of "Try it before you buy it"?

    I'm confused.

    1. xenny

      Re: Live CD?

      Maybe it is tricky to test install kernel drivers that require a reboot on a Live CD ?

  6. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "And if you're on Debian 11 or a relative thereof, it might be time to switch distros."

    Or don't buy Nvidia Useful to know.

  7. rgjnk Bronze badge
    Boffin

    Whose fault?

    It's maybe fair enough if the latest applications maybe won't work with older drivers, and graphics APIs and features change. That said APIs don't change that often and compatibility fallback is usually a thing unless you're after a feature (eg. raytrace) that just didn't exist earlier on.

    But drivers breaking due to kernel updates shouldn't really be a thing though unless it's a major major update; if the design of the platform and driver model is robust then the interfaces should be abstracted enough that drivers should be forward compatible even if you maybe don't see the benefit of the latest kernel features. Assuming of course no bugs/hacks were in the driver.

    Maybe the fault isn't all in the closed source driver and maybe it's also partially from the way the basic driver model was designed to be used? You can't just fall back onto 'edit the source' and/or 'recompile everything' once a system is meant to be a general purpose commodity platform; what suited the enthusiasts maybe isn't robust enough to support how it's used now.

  8. Eecahmap

    My home media server is on kernel 6.11.10 and Nvidia 390.157-10.

    Someone out there in Debian- or Devuan-land is tweaking the Nvidia packages so they'll compile and link.

    Like others, though, I've switched to AMD GPUs, and haven't bought Nvidia since 2014.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Do tell me how, please!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not just a linux problem

    I had a Roland Edirol UA-25 Audio Input/Output box. It's not supported by anything newer than Windows 8.1. I'm not sure if the windows updater would warn me, I've always taken the update as an opportunity to make a fresh start.

    It's fine on the latest Linux though.

  10. Freddellmeister

    Why does Liniux devs activly preventing Nvidia 390 running on newer kernels?

    Poor.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      > Why does Liniux devs activly preventing Nvidia 390 running on newer kernels?

      They don't. Nvidia does.

      1. david 12 Silver badge

        They don't. Nvidia does.

        Nvidia didn't change the drivers. Linux changed the kernel.

        I'm not buying into the hardware support argument: I've got enough anger with the javascript frameworks. But let's acknowledge that decisions are made by both sides.

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          > Nvidia didn't change the drivers.

          Nvidia wrote the drivers with hard-coded dependencies on specific versions (or ranges of version numbers) of glibc, X.org, the linker, etc.

          This has been going on for decades now. And it wasn't just Nvidia in times gone by -- I had a quite nice for its time Toshiba laptop with an ATI chip that didn't work past 12.04. As in, 12.04.1 or later broke the driver.

          Now, AMD owns ATI and the drivers are FOSS and these problems have largely gone away.

          Nvidia should man up and do the same. If the hardware is so old that the last 2 driver versions no longer support it, then open the source code up.

          There is another side to this problem that does not directly affect me: Wayland can't reliably talk to legacy drivers, either. So if you do get a hacked driver running on a newer kernel, you can't use KDE or GNOME with Wayland on those drivers anyway.

  11. LaoTsu
    Linux

    I have a laptop with an Nvidia dGPU and AMD iGPU, but much newer. On Fedora 41, using the dkms system whenever either the kernel updates, or Nvidia drivers update the kernel modules are rebuilt, and whatever driver works with whatever kernel version. Looking at available packages here, I have:

    akmod-nvidia.x86_64: Akmod package for nvidia kernel module(s)

    akmod-nvidia-390xx.x86_64: Akmod package for nvidia-390xx kernel module(s)

    akmod-nvidia-470xx.x86_64: Akmod package for nvidia-470xx kernel module(s)

    So would a switch to Fedora cure the issue in older laptops running distros which are Debian based? Genuine question, as I haven't run Debian / Mint in years, and that was on older hardware.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      I can try and see.

      I don't think so. Ubuntu Jammy with the new kernel will happily show you the driver and offer to install it... But it won't work. It's perfectly possible to try to install the driver, but it won't link correctly against kernel 6.5 or newer.

      DKMS is not a Fedora thing and is included and works fine on Ubuntu as well.

      There are various hacked and tweaked drivers out there. I only tried 2 variants. Neither worked.

      So the presence of the driver doesn't mean it will work.

  12. mark l 2 Silver badge

    Nvidea doesn't care about Linux on the desktop as they make their money out of Linux on the server side, and i doubt there are many servers with GPUs from 2011 wanting to run the latest Ubuntu versions.

    I believe they only supply around 10 years of driver updates form when a GPU is released for Windows as well, and who is to say whether the last Windows drivers for a 14 year old GPU would work on Windows 11 now either?

    Its a shitty practice but I guess the lesson is to just not to buy anything with Nvidea integrated GPUs if you want to run Linux on it for a decade plus, until Nvidea can be persuaded to open source the drivers for their out of support hardware or the open source Nvidea drivers are able to fully support the legacy hardware.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "until Nvidea can be persuaded to open source the drivers"

      I think you likely mean "unless" rather than "until".

  13. PM.

    I have a 2016 Lenovo laptop that I upgraded from Ubuntu Mate 20.04 to 22.04 only few weeks back . 24.04 will have to wait few more years and possibly another machine.

    Yes , I got kernel panic after upgrade but it was easily resolvable, thank goodness :-) /my machine has Radeon/intel combo/

    After all I only needed to replace ugly new icon set with beautiful classic set, maintained in some obscure github site, and now I am happy bunny !

  14. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
    Trollface

    Lucky me

    I'm not a gamer / digital artist / video editor so my computing interests aren't really dependent on any kind of GPU acceleration working. GCC will work regardless of what is drifting around in the nVidia driver cesspool. But yeah, mental note noted: don't buy anything nVidia during the upcoming hardware upgrade cycle.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Lucky me

      > my computing interests aren't really dependent on any kind of GPU acceleration

      You think that, but try using a machine with none at all.

      There is a big big difference in the 21st century between "no acceleration" and "only very basic limited acceleration".

      Frankly I can't see any difference between this and the built-in Intel graphics, but this way, I have a bit more free RAM, my Displayport 2nd screen works better, and CPU utilisation is a little lower. The machines run a little hotter but since they are normally plugged in it doesn't matter. Using a 2nd screen without mains electricity is possible but it's tricky.

  15. John_3_16
    Thumb Up

    Good to know.

    Thanks for the info update. I am a hardcore "use it till it breaks" type of person. My current system is an Acer 5733Z laptop with driver dates showing as 2013. 10 plus years old. Windows 7 Home Premium (EOL) still receiving security updates via those released for Server 2008R2 64 bit. They share the same core (6.1). These will stop Jan 2026.

    I trained first on Apple & CPM, then some Unix main frames, & finally Windows. I refuse to migrate to Win 10 (now being dumped) or Win 11 that requires all new hardware & that is dumped on with every buggy update. I have always used a version of Ubuntu/Linux as a secondary OS on my machines for the last decade. My current fav is ZORIN core(free). It will become my primary OS in Jan 2026. This laptop meets every computing need that I have.

    I simply am NOT going to upgrade to satisfy the greed of the current tech giants who own & control the world now. Reading the comments here revealed the best advice I agree with. DON'T buy Nvidia. My system uses Intel. I suppose I may upgrade my hardware in the next 5 years. Something with a touch screen, 1 tb SSD & 16/32 gig of memory. I am not a gamer or work for NASA or the NSA so I don't need Nvidia graphics. I will be very careful choosing my brand of installed GPU. It will be a compliant Linux machine. ZORIN slow walks their updates but work flawlessly because of it.

    I agree that it is sad when these giants lose concern for older customers & don't spend a minuscule amount of their billions to support older hardware that still works & serves a purpose. Our landfills are over filled & our world is becoming irreversibly polluted.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Good to know.

      > I agree that it is sad when these giants lose concern for older customers & don't spend a minuscule amount of their billions to support older hardware that still works & serves a purpose. Our landfills are over filled & our world is becoming irreversibly polluted.

      Strongly agreed. Which is another reason for keeping 13-14 year old laptops in use, of course, in addition to the much better keyboards, bigger range of ports, etc.

      I would not personally buy nVidia kit, no. But the quad-core version of the Thinkpad W520 has one and it's not negotiable. The Core i7 version of the T420 has one.

      If I have the thing in there, then I want to use it.

      After the downgrade, I only needed to change one thing to have all the same apps: add a repo for VirtualBox, so I could get rid of 6 and install 7. All my other apps are fully up to date.

      I also removed a whole list of custom APT repositories for Skype, Signal, Telegram, Spotify, and other fairly rarely-used apps -- many installed with `deb-get` -- and replaced them with the Snap packaged versions with the built-in tools. Snap is pretty quick these days and it was considerably less work than ensuring all those repos have old enough versions for a 3YO Ubuntu and that they work, Ubuntu has current signing keys, etc.

      I know, this is heresy, it will horrify many who consider themselves purists, but it works. I may in time do the same with everything that doesn't _require_ a native `.deb` package. Snap is built in and I find it cleaner and simpler than Flatpak.

  16. L'Ecossais

    Is upgrading with the legacy driver in place the issue?

    I read this article with particular interest as I have the same model of Thinkpad as Liam and as a Windows user, but with some Linux experience, have one eye on the October deadline.

    Given the comment about trying ahead of time, I decided to adopt the "Live CD" approach to see how the laptop would behave depending on the video chip(s) were configured in FW. I therefore downloaded the latest versions of Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Opensuse and Debian. To my surprise, given Liam's experience, all of them worked quite happily with the Nvidia chip in Optimus mode.

    I'm afraid I'm not very experienced in querying systemd based OS's for driver versions but viewing the dmesg files in Ubuntu and Mint, both of these were using nouveau version 1.4.0. For the record, Mint was based on Ubuntu 13.3.0 using kernel 6.8.0-51 whereas the Ubuntu Live image is Ubutu 14.2.0 using kernel 6.11.0-8. The other distro's reported using the Nvidia chip in the output of lspci.

    I think the lesson from this is that the "average user" could quite easily migrate from Windows to any of these Linux distro's with only the learning curve of a new OS to face rather than the difficulties of mixing and matching kernel versions with proprietary drivers.

    NB Obviously a quick test of each distro didn't stress the setup too far but if all the "average user" does is surf the web, use email, watch some videos and edit Office docs, I think they could quite happily use older HW rather than follow the MS landfill mandate.

    Lastly, isn't it strange how we stick with outdated terms like Live CD when it's more likely to be a USB key and talk about taping TV programs when we're actually recording them to an HDD!

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