I have an Intel i7-8700K and a GTX 1080 Ti that I'm not ready to replace yet. I used Ubuntu for about a year and generally liked it, although I ran into some manageable graphics-driver problems. I'm comfortable following installation guides, but I'm not an advanced Linux user. I recently wiped my system and installed Nobara, only to discover that my graphics card is no longer supported. Should I abandon Nobara, or can I install the necessary legacy drivers manually? If Nobara is no longer practical, which distribution would be the easiest and most reliable choice for this hardware?
4 Answers
I’ve used an older NVIDIA workstation card on Fedora after normal driver support ended. Legacy drivers can keep the card working, but there’s no guarantee they’ll remain supported indefinitely. If you want the least troubleshooting, Bazzite or CachyOS would be safer choices than trying to force Nobara to work.
Replacing the GPU with an AMD card would generally make Linux easier because the drivers are built into the kernel and Mesa stack. That said, if upgrading is still too expensive, keeping the 1080 Ti and choosing a distro with automatic legacy-driver setup is perfectly reasonable for now.
Nobara’s current support list no longer includes the GTX 1080 series, so manually installing the drivers may not be a reliable long-term solution. You’ll probably have an easier time with a distribution that still packages the required legacy NVIDIA driver.
CachyOS and Bazzite should detect the GTX 1080 and set up compatible drivers automatically. Fedora is another option, but it requires enabling the appropriate repositories and installing the 580-series legacy packages manually. For Fedora, the installation is essentially one command: `sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia-580xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-580xx-cuda -y`.
An upgrade is possible eventually, but the cost is still high enough that I’d prefer to keep the 1080 Ti working for a while longer.