I have a GeForce 210 GPU on an EndeavourOS computer. I use Noveau drivers, but some apps like Blender have a broken user interface, and KDE acts weird sometimes. I tried installing the proprietary NVIDIA drivers following the Archlinux wiki, but I did not have any display output at all. I also tried running the NVIDIA driver .run file, but it warned me about changing drivers, and I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think that I understand the steps in the wiki. I would also like to use Wayland on my computer.
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New proprietary drivers maintained in repos will not support a GPU that old.
The newest driver that supports the 210 is 340.108. https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/156163/en-us/
You will have to either use Nouveau, or install this with your favorite AUR helper
Unfortunately, as people have already said, the most recent version of the closed-source driver will only support recent hardware. Nvidia periodically deprecates swathes of cards. Gentoo has a nice chart of which was the last driver version to support which GPU, plus other details. Your problems may be arising in part from the fact that your card has no Vulkan or OpenGL 4 support.
From my experience with a card from the generation previous to yours (NV40/Curie) for which I kept the proprietary drivers for a while after their best-before date had passed, it causes some trouble. The older drivers get to a point where they won’t work with newer kernels or X versions (in your case, you can use at most kernel 5.4 and Xorg 1.20, per nvidia ). I ended up keeping an old kernel until the accumulation of needed bug fixes got to be too much and I switched to Nouveau.
Long-term, it’s just more of a nuisance than it’s worth. Use Nouveau, turn off fancy effects or downgrade to software rendering on anything that’s glitchy, and buy an AMD card next time.
This may not be relevant since I have a different gpu and am on Ubuntu, but when I installed proprietary drivers I didn’t have display either because I was using a version of the driver that was too recent (whether due to dropped compatibility or a bug I don’t know). An older one might work!
On ubuntu you can use the “apt-mark hold” command to keep certain packages from updating.
Eg: sudo apt-mark hold nvidia-kernel-common-470-server
