Nvidia GLX 418.xx driver... Did it go the way of the Unicorn?

jonzlo

What happened to the Nvidia 418.xx GLX driver? I'm running Solus 4.1 with the LTS kernel. Solus is only offering me the 390.xx driver for my Nvidia GTX 880m. The Nvidia driver info page says the 418.xx driver is rock and roll. After scouring this forum, I found that last year your nvidia-glx-driver was the 418.xx. Now that one, the developer, and the beta are all 455.xx. Nvidia says that the 455.xx only supports the RTX 3xxx series of graphics cards, two of them. Disclaimer: I love you guys and have used your OS on my gaming rig since Solus 3.0. Would you be so kind as to explain to me what my options are with my 880m? And dare I ask, if and when the 418.xx will be supported and available in your repo again? Or if I'm safe to add Nvidia's driver repo as a PPA and snag up that 418.xx (LTS) driver (hopefully I'll have the dependencies for it)? Thanks. I owe you a beer or two.

Harvey

jonzlo Nvidia says that the 455.xx only supports the RTX 3xxx series of graphics cards, two of them.

It supports a lot of cards, just not yours.

jonzlo would you be so kind as to explain to me what my options are with my 880m?

Installing the driver that the Hardware Drivers application recommends you which is the 390.x.x driver as you said.

jonzlo And dare I ask, if and when the 418.xx will be supported and available in your repo again?

Never. 4.18.x is not a legacy driver series. That is to say it does not continue to receive patches to work with newer versions of the kernel etc. Somewhere along the line nvidia removed support for your card from newer drivers and the the newest driver that supports your card and is still supported by nvidia is the 390 series.

jonzlo Or if I'm safe to add Nvidia's driver repo as a PPA and snag up that 418.xx (LTS) driver (hopefully I'll have the dependencies for it)?

Solus is not based on Ubuntu. A PPA wil not work. Even if a third party repo existed it would be unsupported and break every time Solus updated the kernel.

jonzlo

Thanks for the reply, Harvey. All the above received and understood... Except where you said that the 418.xx is not a legacy driver and that the 880m isn't supported under that driver by Nvidia anymore. On their driver search for 880m compatibility, including LTS kernel, the 418 driver is what pops up. When looking under the compatibility tab for that driver, just to be sure, lo and behold. They are either messing with me or it's still supported.

Harvey

jonzlo
That means nothing, its just the last driver they released that worked on that card, newer drivers had support pulled. It does not mean it gets patches anymore.

Here is what nvidia's driver branches looks like:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix + https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver
Only "Linux x86_64/AMD64/EM64T" section is relevant to Solus and of those legacy drivers only 390 is still supported by nvidia.

glx-driver was once at version 418 and continues to get updated, now at 455.45.01. In nvidia's infinite wisdom they stop support for older cards seemingly randomly and do not plan removal around the creation of new legacy branches. So 418 is in limbo. Wanting 418 is like asking for version 4.20 of the kernel, it just will not happen, an would lead to a lot more drivers thanks to nvidia's poor planning an there are already enough.

Some distributions will have these "limbo" drivers available via 3rd party repositories that are not officially supported, Some keep them in the repo until users report their systems being broken etc. Solus ends support when nvidia does, if you want 418 you'll have to find another distro.

Solus provides:

nouveau (Open source driver)
glx-driver (Newest main branch nvidia driver)
beta-driver (Sometimes a beta driver is needed to support newer hardware, otherwise it follows glx)
developer-driver (Beta driver for testing new vulkan features, which is the 2nd link above)
390-driver (Newest legacy driver still supported by nvidia for older cards not supported by any other drivers. Some really old cards may need to use the nouveau driver such as cards that needed the 304 or 340 branches as those are dead)

Some distros will keep no longer supported legacy series such as 340 around because it still works on their LTS kernel. For Solus if it does not work on LTS and current or like I said earlier nvidia ends support, it is gone.

EDIT:
If you think this is needlessly complicated it is! Guess what you have to do for AMD? Nothing, it literally "just works". You're not worrying about driver branches, you don't install any. Install Solus, update and not worry. You have the latest for your card.

jonzlo

I'm really beginning to despise Nvidia. If you have windows, they require you to install and run in the background their bloatware while if you go Linux, they bog the end user and developer with a maze of drivers, incompatibility, random end-of-support, and general headaches. And AMD is too busy trying to be like them rather than honing in on the largest up and coming gaming community: us, the Linux crowd.

EDIT: Right. From what I hear, AMD's video cards do just work. Sorry. The inspiration for that left field comment crawled out of the recesses of an autistic security/privacy standpoint that stems from their use of proprietary microcode blobs, where I should have said, "AMD is trying to be more like Intel..." cue unrelated tangent inappropriate for the topic. Rant over. Thanks again, Harvey. My next graphics card will be an AMD.