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Comment by Jackknife9 | Hacker News Reader

I tried to leave Windows 11 for Linux - it just didn't work for me. I installed EndeavourOS onto my main gaming desktop. It worked great for a while and ran all the games I played with my friends. However, one night when I went on to play a game I ran a system update and it seemed to completely break my nvidea drivers - I tried reinstalling them and also using the open source driver. This meant I just couldn't play any games that night and was simply diagnosing linux issues.

I probably chose the wrong distro for this but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues. I don't use it for anything other than playing games so for my time I just went back to Windows 10 and will use that until apps stop working.

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Haha, exact same thing happened to me a couple weeks ago. You probably had the same issue as me. The driver dropped support for older cards and you had to switch to a legacy AUR package. I fixed it with some frantic googling while my friends waited a half hour. Not sure how you would know this without subscribing to some arch news feed or something. Not ideal.

That's exactly how it's supposed to work: Arch expects you to check the notes on their news section always before you update. The NVIDIA driver issue and solution was posted on Dec 20th.

I'm not saying I'm reading these regularly, just that yes it's the expected way.

If the expected way and the attitude is to just break user installs, then that's no better than Windows, perhaps even worse.

It's the Arch way. A beginner shouldn't be using Arch, Gentoo, NixOS or FreeBSD etc.

That's why there are myriad of distros.

So it wouldn't be incorrect to refer to Arch and Arch based distros as 'well, if you want to have fun with a broken system, otherwise avoid', just so it could be mentioned in a succinct way when talking about what distros one could try.

No, I don't think that's a fair way to put it. People regularly report having quite old Arch installs without stability issues. And people also regularly advice Linux newcomers not to pick Arch.

If you check their news section, it's a reasonable number of notes, 13 for last year. I think it's fair to say it seems to work well if you are willing to follow their procedure and already know what you're doing.

https://archlinux.org/news/

Fair enough, and now I do. It is still the most recent news item and the instructions for the fix are clear: https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-driver-drops-pascal-su...

When I was googling to fix in the moment, I unfortunately did not find the news page.

> I probably chose the wrong distro for this

Indeed. Arch-based distros ought to be managed by intermediate-advanced users. Linux Mint is better suited to beginners.

> but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues.

If you decide to give it another go, and you have the means, I suggest using an AMD graphics card. Nvidia's drivers are notorious for being troublesome on Linux, and although they can usually be made to work (either by the user or by a distro developer), the drivers for AMD GPUs are much better integrated with the OS.

I switched to AMD a few years ago and have been very pleased with the results, both in games and in non-gaming tasks. (I don't use my GPU for LLM development, though, so I can't speak to the current state of things in that area.)

I have been 'enjoying' this with Debian on a PC with a 1080Ti nvidia card, which is no longer supported by the nvidia v590 + drivers. I've had to pin to v580, but the whole "oops, I updated, rebooted and 'look ma, no high-resolution anymore'" got tired really quickly. You have my sympathies.

EndeavourOS is apparently Arch-based so I've got no useful suggestions for fixing there, sorry.

Never heard of that Linux variant. Use one of the big names: Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian.

If you have a choice don't use nVidia either, but the bigger distributions do handle them well.

Yeah the real mistake was starting with Endeavour. I wonder just how many people are turned off by their initial Linux experience because they choose stuff like Arch, Gentoo, or some obscure variant rather than Fedora, Kubuntu or Mint. Even stuff like Bazzite is probably an odd choice for a novice - though it would have handled that failed nVidia upgrade nicely.

This is why I go the console route. I tried building a PC after being inundated with people saying it was better. Even on Windows it felt like it turned into a sys admin job that I didn’t care for. I just wanted to play some games after work.

I think using an atomic distro like Bazzite would have solved your problem.

The fix is not buying Nvidia, even though some people here will tell you how much AMDs drivers actually sucked in 2009 and how good Nvidia is now and all that noise.

Buy full AMD in 2026, and you'll have no problems with games.

Also, Bazzite would have saved you from this.

I can't understand this reasoning. System updates obviously don't become less risky because of the OS they're updating. But going back to Win10 means having less control over when those updates happen (and much less control over, and understanding of, what is updated), and waiting much longer for them to complete.

> System updates obviously don't become less risky because of the OS they're updating

The last time I used arch, I ran an update and it broke my bootloader, meaning the next time I restarted it wouldn't boot at all.

Sure I could make a recovery USB and fix it, but at that point I was away from home, and just really needed to do the totally crazy thing of "using my computer to actually do work".

(To be clear, I didn't and I'm not recommending going back to Windows, just a more sane Linux)

Yikes. It's 2026. "Don't break the bootloader" should be table stakes for any OS distribution's update process by now. I am not a fan of Windows or macOS, but I don't even recall the last time an operating system software broke my ability to boot--maybe during the Windows 2000 days?

Yet, when you go online to refresh your memory on how to update your Linux installation, too many of the guides still say STEP 1: Back everything up because you may not be able to boot after you do this!

My point was exactly that GGP shouldn't have expected to be able to do the system update without risk.

But the usual way to install Linux nowadays is from a live boot, so you automatically have a recovery drive anyway. It's not hard to set up regular restore points with Timeshift or similar, either.

That said, I haven't had problems like what you describe in nearly 4 years.

I've used Windows, Ubuntu, and NixOS all for longer than I ever used arch and never had an update leave my computer inoperable.

And the other person did, as have many others on support forums.

Updates generally just work, on the balance of my experience and other available evidence. It's still unwise to schedule them at a time where a failure would be more disruptive than baseline, and it's still best practice to be prepared for a failure and not have to figure things out on the fly.

The mistake is that you did a system update when you wanted to use the computer. Not implying that system updates should be a dangerous thing to do, but just something learnt from experience - I’ve had similar issues, especially with Nvidea drivers and kernel versions getting updated at the same time. The take away is keep the updates to when you have an hour to debug or get comfortable rolling back updates.

So just like windows, don’t update it

Year of the Linux desktop for sure

I mean, you get what you signed up for. If you wanted total stability and infrequent updates then why would you use Arch? (If the answer is "I didn't know what I signed up for" then that's fair. Simply understanding the practical differences between distros is a huge hurdle.)

That's absurd. The system should be able to update itself without fear that it's going to break anything. The user should not be expected to have to set aside time to babysit an update.

Windows isn't perfect in this respect by any means, but it sure seems like it handles updates a lot better than the distros that have been mentioned in this thread; in that Windows at least takes steps to examine your hardware first and to not apply updates where it's known something has fallen out of support.

Windows also, apparently unlike these mentioned distros, maintains a Last Known Good configuration so if an update does start causing failures, it can automatically roll itself back (or, at worst, can manually be rolled back). There are some distros that do similar, particularly immutable distros; but honestly this sort of thing should be table stakes to the point that if a distro doesn't do it, it should be laughed out of the room.

There is absolutely no acceptable excuse for any operating system to break itself in an update.

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