Hello, comrades. I come to you seeking help. Recently, my young sister decides she would like to install Linux. Good brother that I am, I want to help her.
Here’s the kicker. Her PC has a GTX 770. The newest driver for such a card is #470 according to Ubuntu-derived systems. Alas, almost every “normal person” distro uses Wayland now, and Wayland doesn’t support such an old driver. I am not going to install Arch on a 10-year-old’s PC, btw.
What are some good distros I can install on her PC so that neither I nor her have to have a headache getting Wayland out and X11 in?
Thank you, friends.
That’s definitely one of the problems with closed source drivers that doesn’t get talked about enough. Having a card that NVIDIA considers EOL on Linux basically turns them to e-waste.
They’re mostly still compatible with Xorg because thankfully X11 development has basically been abandoned for the last decade so the drivers still sort of works. But at this point my GTX 460M which is still perfectly capable for most things is such a chore I wish that this laptop came with Intel HD integrated graphics. Kernel driver patches, X11 ABI patches, configurations to ignore versions of some things and the instability that ensues.
If it’s a desktop honestly I’d just replace the 770 with an equivalent AMD card, it’s not worth the effort. At least on the AMD side, cards from 20 years ago still gets open-source driver updates.