Nvidia axed support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta cards in its new 590 driver branch for Linux, which means the GTX 900 and 1000 series are basically cooked. The 970, 980 Ti, 1060, 1080, and even the ancient 750 Ti got dropped from active development, and anybody trying to run the fresh drivers will just see their GPU vanish from the system. The company says it will keep pushing security patches for the legacy 580 branch until 2028, but there will be zero performance tweaks, stability fixes, or feature updates.
The reality is that Linux keeps moving forward with Wayland, Mesa changes, and kernel upgrades, and the frozen 580 driver branch is not going to keep up. Nouveau exists as a fallback option, but it runs like garbage for anything demanding because power management and performance scaling are still broken. Nvidia wants to focus resources on modern architectures instead of babysitting decade-old silicon, which makes sense from their perspective but leaves a ton of people stuck on outdated software or forced into hardware upgrades.
The reality is that Linux keeps moving forward with Wayland, Mesa changes, and kernel upgrades, and the frozen 580 driver branch is not going to keep up. Nouveau exists as a fallback option, but it runs like garbage for anything demanding because power management and performance scaling are still broken. Nvidia wants to focus resources on modern architectures instead of babysitting decade-old silicon, which makes sense from their perspective but leaves a ton of people stuck on outdated software or forced into hardware upgrades.
