Hello, I have been trying to get my drivers to play more nice with my hardware. When I originally installed Arch, it automatically installed the nouveau driver which mostly worked. However I was having issues with some windows rendering with big white boxes and a couple random crashes of the OS.

After looking into fixes I was recommended to swap to nvidia drivers, and I followed a guide to install the AUR nvidia-470xx-utils. But this completely broke my drivers. Luckily I was able to use TTY to revert these changes and got the nouveau drivers reinstalled.

With that background out of the way, I’m now dealing with some new issues. After logging in it now takes much longer to load the desktop and my whole system will randomly reboot. I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

I am happy to post any more info or clarify points, I’m still very new to a lot of this.

Here is my gpu readout when I run lspci -v:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 650M Mac Edition] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: Apple Inc. Device 00fc Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 16 Memory at c0000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M] Memory at 90000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M] Memory at a0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M] I/O ports at 2000 [size=128] Expansion ROM at c1000000 [disabled] [size=512K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel modules: nouveau, nvidia_drm, nvidia

EDIT: It is done, thanks to everyone here for the help! No more hairdryer temps!

  • pewpew@feddit.it
    31·
    11 hours ago

    Linux and legacy Nvidia cards don’t go well toghether.

    Probably the oldest GPU you want to use is one from the GTX700 series (2014), anything older doesn’t have usable drivers, the official ones are outdated and likely broken with no Wayland support.

    I hate to say this but probably Windows 10 is your best option

    EDIT: I had similar graphical issues on a Mac Mini 2010 running Windows 10, but I fixed it by using an older driver version. If you need the ancient drivers I have, let me know

    • philycheeze@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      11 hours ago

      I appreciate the rec but windows is a no-go for me. I think I’d rather cut my teeth on the Linux stuff now than wait another 5 years, ya know?

  • glitching@lemmy.ml
    4·
    15 hours ago

    the GT650M/GT750M in 2012/2013 models are beyond useless nowadays, using either noveau or some ancient nvidia driver version. that’s for wayland, it’s somewhat better with X11 but you’ll lose a buncha stuff regarding HiDPI and touchpad etc.

    so what @waffle@sh.itjust.work said, only it’s way simpler to do that - disable discrete graphics via an EFI variable. you’ll lose video out but gain a way less power hungry machine, running way cooler.

    • philycheeze@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      11 hours ago

      I was under the impression the nvidia drivers would help my system run a bit more efficiently. So if this provides the same result then I’m happy. Thank you, I’ll try this out later today!

      • glitching@lemmy.ml
        2·
        11 hours ago

        you got two graphics chips in there - Intel HD4000 and Nvidia GT650M. the system is supposed to switch amongst them based on load, but that doesn’t always work as expected and the Nvidia chip is always powered on, using battery, emitting heat, etc.

        by entering this variable, you turn off the Nvidia chip entirely and the system runs off the reliable and super-supported Intel HD4000, which is hella plenty for the majority of use cases.

        I got one of these and running on the Intel graphics it performs like it was built for linux; with Nvidia, total shitshow.

        also make sure to implement the wake/sleep scripts to turn off/on CPU cores if it takes a long time to wake from sleep.

        • philycheeze@sh.itjust.worksOP
          1·
          8 hours ago

          Before I do something stupid, am I safe to boot to this MacOS usb drive? It was flashed via dd using the High Sierra ISO from archive.org.

          I don’t want overwrite my installation which I’m pretty sure it would prompt me to install beforehand. Just want to do a quick sanity check first.

          • glitching@lemmy.ml
            2·
            6 hours ago

            yeah, you’re safe. either boot to the installer, open terminal, enter command, reboot, or, hold down command-s before clicking on the usb icon. that will boot into single user mode, which is way faster.

  • waffle@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    16 hours ago

    Do you need your NVIDIA GPU? It sucks but the best solution is probably to disable this GPU and rely on the integrated GPU of your CPU. You can take a look at this guide from the Arch Wiki which explains how to do that

    Sorry that I can’t help you with getting that GPU to work. I’ve seen some people claiming this MBP model works great with Linux but no info on if they’re using the NVIDIA GPU :/