Good old "Corporate Mentality" at work!!! Leaving the choice to the User is not in their playbook!
Good old "Corporate Mentality" at work!!! Leaving the choice to the User is not in their playbook!
6 Likes
I know they are “discontinued” by Nvidia—does this mean no security patches (hence leading to this decision)?
4 Likes
I understand the disappointment, especially for users who are still running perfectly functional Kepler-era hardware. However, I think it is important to distinguish between Canonical arbitrarily removing support and Canonical discontinuing maintenance of a driver branch that NVIDIA itself has already declared end-of-life.
Nvidia 470 series received its final upstream update on June 4, 2024. Since then, there have been no official fixes for newer kernels, X server changes, or security issues from NVIDIA. Ubuntu position appears to be that they cannot reasonably continue building, signing, and distributing proprietary modules that are no longer maintained by the vendor, particularly in an LTS release where security and long-term maintainability are major commitments.
That said, there is still a legitimate discussion to be had about user choice. Some distributions continue to provide legacy packages with an explicit “unsupported” label, allowing experienced users to accept the associated risks. For owners of Kepler GPUs, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Noble Numbat may effectively become the last release with a straightforward, officially packaged path for the 470 driver.
I do not necessarily agree that this is simply “corporate mentality,” but I do think Canonical could improve the transition experience by documenting long-term options more clearly for affected users, whether that means remaining on 24.04 LTS, using Nouveau, or manually maintaining the legacy driver outside the official repositories.
The difficult reality is that once the hardware vendor ends support, every distribution eventually has to decide where to draw the line between preserving compatibility and maintaining a secure, supportable platform.
8 Likes
Last week, I ran into this with a GT 210 on Linux Mint v21.1. My notes:
NOTE: Upgrading from driver v470 to v535 threw an error with the following:
“The NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 GPU installed in this system is supported through the NVIDIA 470.xx Legacy drivers. Please visit Unix Drivers | NVIDIA for more information. The 535.309.01 NVIDIA driver will ignore this GPU. Continuing probe…”
sudo apt purge nvidia-driver-535
NOTE: The aforementioned command removed both:
nvidia-driver-470
nvidia-driver-535
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt autoclean
sudo shutdown -r now
NOTE: The GPU is now using Nouveau. “Driver Manager” shows that “nvidia-driver-390” is recommended, but I did not test it.
5 Likes
Hello,
I ran into this exact problem with Mint 21 as well. The mintupdate installs the 535 driver without warning if the 470 driver is already installed, thereby breaking compatibility with older graphics cards (in this case, a GT640). The solution is to remove the nvidia packages in fallback boot mode, then install the nvidia-driver-470-server package; this still works perfectly and hasn’t been broken by the 535 server package, so it might be worth locking the package in place in case they decide to look into this later.
The root of the problem may be that the 470 driver does not work on systems with Secure Boot/UEFI when used with kernels newer than 6.8; therefore, as a precaution and without further consideration, the ability to install the 470 driver is removed from all systems where kernel 6.8 or newer can be installed. For example, Mint 21 (based on 22.04) is being used on the system described above with the 5.15 LTS kernel, and I boot via legacy mode (it’s running on a 3rd-gen i7-based Xeon; the motherboard itself supports early UEFI, but on multi-boot systems where it can be avoided, I never use UEFI because Windows’s appalling UEFI handling means it can crash very easily), so whilst it would cause problems relatively rarely under 22.04, it’s more likely to be a relevant issue with 24.04, but unfortunately they’ve applied the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.
5 Likes
Welcome to the community @F3nyo, and our forums! 
1 Like
@F3nyo, after a month, the Nouveau driver appears to be stable on Linux Mint v21.1 with kernel series v5.15 and the GT 210. I have been using Nouveau the entire time with SSH/VNC without issue, and this should be the most strenuous use this display driver will see.
If I were relying on Nouveau for 1080p video, I wonder how well it would compare against the Nvidia driver.
This system with the GT 210 is not using Secure Boot, but when I get a chance, I may try installing and holding the Nvidia 470 driver.
2 Likes
The solution to the problem of NVIDIA and Distros removing packages for drivers no longer supported by NVIDIA is to have some trustworthy 3rd party create a repository of known good packages for each of the officially released driver packages.
I thought I saw something about that being available, but I am not sure.
Maybe someone else knows.
4 Likes