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!
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I know they are “discontinued” by Nvidia—does this mean no security patches (hence leading to this decision)?
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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appears to be that they cannot reasonably continue building, signing, and distributing proprietary modules that are no longer maintained by the vendor, particularly in an LTS release where security and long-term maintainability are major commitments.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.