my gpu is gtx 1650 from laptop msi gf63. im wondering if after 10 years will the gpu still have a driver in linux ? im asking this to know if the life of gpu would be better with linux or windows. it may be an absurd question but it makes sense to me. as if the usecase its to play cyberpunk(yes it does work) on a sepfic version(cracked no updates).
will that version still be useable ten years from now on ubuntu with this laptop?
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All my machines still work after a decade or two. As time goes on, the opensource drivers for old cards gets more reliable.
My partners PC recently had its GPU go “unsupported” by nvidia, but it works just fine with the driver that now supports it.
do they game on it? im concered with the gpu not being able to play the games it plays now(locked at same game version) in years. so is my fear logical or not?
She does. Just about everything Just Works on Arch + Steam + GTX 1060
Check protondb and assume that it works unless they specifically resist it working with kernel level anticheat.
thanks ,that seems good. i dont play any online game just cracks. do you know if they work good with linux? (fitgirl,dodi etc)
edit
also if this isnt a nosy question,what does she play? im intersed in knowing if these are just indie games that run on anything or real games.
I don’t play pirated games, the convenience of “it just works” and accumulating everything on steam directed me that way quite some time ago.
I’ve heard lutris and friends should make repacks work.
Edit: also “real games” only don’t work because the manufacturer chose to break it. There’s nothing special about what AAA does, other than abuse their customers. There’s no secret sauce. Only secretive source.
If it’s a Windows game, it’s still possible to play them via tools like Lutris and Bottles. Sometimes you can just double click the
.exefile, and Wine will auto-generate a prefix (i.e. directory where an instance of Wine is stored), and you can play it.Also, virtually all games are real games. Indie games do not “run on anything,” and most indie devs do not target multi-platform support, as that takes extra knowledge and effort. What makes it so Linux can run just about any game is a bunch of dedicated global volunteers who were somewhat recently given a leg up by Valve’s Proton.
The only thing she’d have problems with is games that use kernel-anticheat.
Check https://protondb.com/ to see if your games will run and/or what small tweaks you might need.
Nvidia will stop supporting the card officially around the same time on both platforms. With Linux, a viable open source driver may exist in the future, as there is work on nvk which should support that generation of card.
is the nvk good for gaming?
It’s still in development, so sometimes yes, sometimes no. Expect that to change and improve, however.
Also, you could use ubuntu premium pro extra to get longterm kernel support for years. So even if the old driver would break with a future kernel version, you could then use that kernel version for a long time
It will TECHNICALLY still work at whatever version Nvidia cuts off support at, which is pretty soon for GTX cards (they’ve already cut off the mobile counterparts). So you’ll stop getting updates, but it should still work as long as that driver is made available still in some form that whatever distro you are using can install it, or you compile it from scratch. I would not trust Nvidia’s installer to still be working by then in it’s current form because it’s a MESS.
so would the last driver nvidia releases for it be installable and useable on ubuntu after ten years? or would there be different driver to use?
I don’t know how Ubuntu in particular handles their drivers, but I would assume that at some point support of your card ends end you will then have to install
nvidia-<number of the last driver version with support>ornvidia-legacyor something like that, which automatically replacesnvidia.
I would be less concerned about the GPU driver and more about the entire distro. Like most distros, Ubuntu has a release cycle where versions of everything are deprecated over time in favour of newer ones, and to expect that the entire OS will be fully supported in 10 years may be asking a bit much (I’m not sure if even their LTS release goes that far).
On top of that, Ubuntu could go bankrupt or get bought out, or simply enshittify (more than it already has) in that time. Expecting Ubuntu specifically to be supported on your laptop in ten years is anyone’s guess.
However, what you can be reasonably sure of is that Linux will continue to support your system, GPU and all, for a very long time. I heard a kernel developer once say that due to the kernel’s modular design, there’s support in there for stuff just one or two people in the whole world use.
As someone else has already pointed out, FOSS support for hardware generally gets better over time, and a GTX video card is ubiquitous. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of those floating around on laptops, servers, and homelabs for a lot more than ten years.
You just might not be able to stick with Ubuntu. The older the hardware, the more you might have to lean toward the more technical distros that make it easy to customise the kernel or that favour old hardware. I like Gentoo for this job, but even Ubuntu or Debian have paths to do compile your own kernel for example.
My 2008 laptop runs Arch quite happily, interestingly enough (arch btw)
what is your de? and is that a thinkpad?
Nvidia ends support at some point, no matter which OS.
Your card is one of the oldest series still supported (Turing), they just cut support for roughly gtx750 to 1080 (Maxwell, Pascal, Volta).
So 10 years from now, you won’t get working Nvidia drivers anymore and will have to rely on older driver versions.
But unlike Windows -where you will have the same problem and MS won’t care at all, so when an old driver has problem with Windows then, you will be on your own- you will have distros or their communities still providing those older drivers regularly and also there is now an open source driver. And your card is the first generation supported by that driver, although with still some hickups. That one will not go away and get better over time, too. Probably also including some work to increase performance on older cards if there is demand - and if I take a look into my crystall ball (or at the hardware prices shitshow) I assume there will be demand.
TL;DR: I can’t absolutely guarantee that your card still works in 10 years as Nvidia’s support will just end at some point. But your chances are a) very good and b) definitely much better on Linux than on Windows.
I don’t know the situation with Ubuntu, but on Arch Linux older Nvidia drivers are available as legacy driver DKMS modules working with the current kernel and tools.
So basically: Yes, this will work on a technical level.
My 1080 is supported by one of the legacy driver packages and is roughly 10 years old now.
I am pretty sure something similar exists for Ubuntu.
just to be sure is this a basic driver or does it play the games the gpu can play? (if its the latter it would be great)
It’s the normal driver in the state it was when Nvidia dropped support. @Ooops@feddit.org described it very well.
No, that’s just the latest official nvidia driver still supporting those cards provided as a regular package for that distro.
Basically the moment nvidia dropped support for some cards, they split the
nvidiapackage. They are now provinding nvidia-open (all cards still officially supported by nvidia are also supported by the new open soruce driver) and ‘nvidia-580xx’ for older ones. And although the actual driver by nvidia doesn’t change anymore the package isstill maintained in the sense that they look out for it to work with up-to-date Linux kernels.Arch Linux at the moment provides (via the community maintained repos) nvidia drivers all the way back to ‘nvidia-340’. That’s GeForce8800 or QuadroFX age from 20 years ago.
