How does Solus handle older Nvidia drivers through updates?

[u/wrobc]

I have an old computer with a Nvidia Maxwell GPU that I want to move away from Ubuntu. That GPU is supported only up to Nvidia Drivers 580 only. Most distros I have tried are making it harder and harder to stick to older driver versions and often try to update to newer versions, requiring me to manually freeze packages and kernel so they work at all or won’t break on an update. Doing so works in some of them but I feel that it may eventually break after some update that will require a newer driver. How does/will Solus deal with sticking to older drivers in future updates?

[u/Stray_Neutrino]

They don’t (you kind of answered your own question).
Even as nVidia drivers get better in Linux, most will move away from Legacy, in much the same way they moved from X11 to Wayland.

[u/wrobc → u/Stray_Neutrino]

I get it. I don’t expect improvements on drivers. But can’t old drivers remain installed in newer systems like any other software that just hasn’t been updated in a while? Of course a driver is not any peace of software, although the easy install in most distros kind of make us feel like it is. In the end, does that mean that eventually I won’t be able to run anything current, therefore safe, in an otherwise perfectly working hardware?

[u/Stray_Neutrino → u/wrobc]

Probably not. I’ve run into this same issue with older WiFi hardware. It usually means someone has forked the driver project and maintains it themselves (with mixed results). I think eventually it will get harder for you to keep older GPU hardware running - at least with the core OS. Eventually.

[u/Chester-Berkeley]

From what I've seen in recent Solus updates, they still maintain the legacy Nvidia drivers, but they have no intention of supporting them for many years to come.

Read more here: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/12926-week-33-2026

[u/Murb0rk-8098]

I recall reading the devs being opposed to partial updates because they almost guarantee your system will break. My guess is you'll need to find an LTS distro that works and use that as long as possible.

[u/squeakctrl]

Week 32 sync had some updates/news for Nvidia. There seems to be further discussion in the replies too that might shed some more light on the 580 situation for you.

https://discuss.getsol.us/d/12914-week-32-2026

[u/wrobc]

Thank you for your answer and sorry for the upcoming non-constructive rambling, but there goes the “linux makes old hardware usable again” philosophy for me then. In this endeavor I am learning that kernels are more integrated to drivers than I thought and that they don’t hold compatibility with older versions. I wouldn’t expect support in the sense that devs would actively test and debug every old version of everything, but that what once worked would at least continue working by retaining backwards compatibility. I really wish my 10-years old hardware would be useful for another 5 or 10 years. After all it’s still powerful enough to be relevant despite being only mid range back then.

[u/VicktorJonzz]

Works fine for me