r/NixOS • u/Effective_Great • 14h ago

Unstable releas + legacy nvidia card.

Hello! I recently hopped onto NixOS and have been running 26.05 stable release since. I wanted to hop onto the unstable release for the latest versions of my apps but asking around (claude) it appears not to be advisable on my system because rn I'm on a laptop with a dual gpu (intel uhd and rtx 1060) and my nvidia card runs on legacy drivers that will break when the current kernel stops supporting them.

Is claude being truthful or did it eat magic mushrooms? Is being on the unstable release worth it?

Also since when is a 1060 considered legacy??? this card still rock pretty hard.

PS: Any tips willing to give a new cult... emmm community member?

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u/Additional-Point-824 14h ago edited 14h ago

NixOS currently supports lots of legacy drivers, covering pretty much anything that someone would be likely to be using. It looks like 580 is what you'll need.

There's more detail in the "Enabling" section on the wiki: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/NVIDIA

It's also worth noting that it's possible to run some packages from unstable while keeping your system primarily on the stable branch. Are you using flakes or channels?

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u/Effective_Great 13h ago

Ok, ill check it out! Im using flakes. I'll look into making only the packages i want from the unstable if its easier than pinning the kernel Ty

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u/A_Canadian_boi 10h ago

Oh boy, I had to make a patch for all this.

TLDR: the 7.2 kernel changed some function names, so drivers <610 won't work with 7.2. Nvidia stopped supporting Pascal (aka the GTX 1000 series) with 582. So you're probably going to have to run the 580 drivers on the 7.1 kernel, since 580 won't work on 7.2 unless you manually patch it and compile it yourself (which, thankfully, is pretty easy on NixOS, but it's still a pain and takes some time).

Also, since you're on a laptop: try looking into the power management section of the NixOS Nvidia wiki page, it's got some really cool tips.

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u/Effective_Great 10h ago

Ok i'll look into it. I decided to pin the lts kernel and move everything else to unstable.