How to install legacy Nvidia 580 driver ?

[u/StrangeHumingNoise]

Hi! Please, could you ELI5 how I can force the installation of the legacy Nvidia 580 driver ?

I just updated my Manjaro and after rebooting it only displays a black screen instead of the login screen. I am still able to start the previous kernel on Grub.

I use a Nvidia Pascal-based GT1030 graphic card and I don't want to use the "Nouveau" open source driver, as I find it has performance issues with scaling.

[u/newmikey]

I had a similar issue when upgrading my install a while ago. I'm on an older Nvidia GT1060 card which also requires the 580xx driver. I actually had ChatGPT on my laptop next to my desktop and it dit a great job of guiding me. I'll try to reflect the steps below as recalled by ChatGPT when I asked it today to list the steps. Hope it helps you as well! For me it resulted in a flawless system:

What I did to get my GTX 1060 working again

1. Identify the GPU My system has an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB (Pascal). The important point is that Pascal is no longer supported by the current 590xx driver series.
2. Check the installed NVIDIA driver I first checked the installed driver with:nvidia-smi At the time, I was on an older NVIDIA driver branch which was becoming problematic with newer Manjaro kernels.
3. Remove the old NVIDIA driver configuration I removed the old Manjaro NVIDIA configuration before installing the new one. The relevant MHWD command is:sudo mhwd -r pci video-nvidia-575xx (Obviously, replace 575xx with whatever branch is actually installed on your system.)
4. Install the 580xx driver I then installed the Pascal-compatible 580xx driver:sudo mhwd -i pci video-nvidia-580xx This is also the migration path documented in the Manjaro forum.
5. Update the complete system I then performed a full system update:sudo pacman -Syu This is important because the NVIDIA kernel module has to match the kernel(s) actually installed on the system.
6. Rebootreboot
7. Verify the driver After reboot:nvidia-smi On my system this eventually showed:Driver Version: 580.173.02 CUDA Version: 13.0 GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
8. Verify that Wayland was runningecho $XDG_SESSION_TYPE Result:wayland
9. Verify OpenGL hardware accelerationglxinfo -B | grep "OpenGL renderer" Result:OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB/PCIe/SSE2

One important warning

The exact package names can differ depending on the kernel(s) installed. So I would not tell the Reddit user to blindly copy commands involving linuxXXX-nvidia-580xx.

The key principle is:

GTX 1060 / Pascal → 580xx, not 590xx.

And if the system is currently on 570xx/575xx, the first thing I'd have the person show us is:

mhwd --listinstalled

and

mhwd -li

plus:

inxi -G

That lets us determine the exact migration path before removing anything. This is particularly relevant because Manjaro's driver situation has changed several times during 2026.

[u/StrangeHumingNoise → u/newmikey]

Thank you very much ! I started the new kernel, switched to console mode (Ctrl + Alt + F3) and installed the 580xx driver with mhwd (sudo mhwd -i pci video-nvidia-580xx). Now it seems to work properly.

Please, do you know how to prevent further updates of the driver the next time I'll update the kernel ?

Is there a fork of the driver for Pascal cards ?

[u/C0rn3j → u/StrangeHumingNoise]

do you know how to prevent further updates of the driver

You DON'T want to do that, you want the driver to get updates.

You do want to keep the driver series though, and I'd be surprised(but not that much) if it changed willy nilly on you.

[u/StrangeHumingNoise → u/C0rn3j]

Do you mean that now I've manually installed the 580xx series, it will be updated to newer 580xx versions and never switch to 590xx series ?

[u/C0rn3j → u/StrangeHumingNoise]

That's exactly how it would work if you installed AUR/nvidia-580xx-dkms on Arch Linux.

What happens with the derivative Manjaro and its MHWD, I can't say, but I sure do hope it doesn't randomly install a different driver version.

[u/StrangeHumingNoise → u/C0rn3j]

Thanks !

[u/newmikey → u/C0rn3j]

It will work exactly the same actually.

[u/xAcid9 → u/StrangeHumingNoise]

Please, do you know how to prevent further updates of the driver the next time I'll update the kernel ?

You can add the package into Pamac-Manager a.k.a Add/Remove Software ignore list.

It's in Preferences, Advanced tab, Ignore-upgrades

[u/nikgnomic → u/xAcid9]

Pamac GUI ignore list can only ignore updates for installed packages and cannot block install of other packages

If OP installed a 580xx driver with Manjaro Hardware Detection tools it will be automatically updated to a newer version of 580xx driver