I’ve been running Arch (vanilla) on a dell laptop for more than a year now, and really happy with it. I also just installed Omarchy on an ancient machine both to try to give it a bit more life and try out a tiling window manager.
I’m now planning to move my main desktop machine over from windows 10, but it has a 1070ti graphics card—which I’m quite happy with as I don’t game at all, and only occasionally run small local LLM models for messing around. I don’t need a newer card, but of course, Nvidia…
So, would I be better off replacing it now with AMD or something else, or just using the older drivers? Will the 580xx- driver still give me a few years before I need to worry.?
I will miss RTX Voice, but happy to give noisettorch a go.
I was using a gtx 670 for about eight months after switching from win10 to arch two summers ago and it was suffering, especially with a triple-monitor setup with one being 34".
The old drivers are really bad, I had to resolve conflicts for games, vulkan was sketchy, putting the monitors to sleep would reset window locations and monitor alignment etc. You will likely not run into many of these issues as you don’t game, but I also suspect these may not be specific to arch.
I ended up pulling the trigger on a 9070XT and it’s been smooth sailing since. I’ll probably not do an upgrade again in the next ten years.
Older nvidia drivers are bad. For new gen it’s getting significantly better but Amd is still in the lead. You could try your gpu see how it works, it is possible it’s still good for you. Also i recommend checking out the Cosmic desktop enviroment. It has served me well even tho it’s still beta. It supports tiling and floating and stcking windows too. Costumizability is between KDE and Gnome. If you need any help just msg me :)
(You can make it so one virtual desktop is floating and the other one is tiling with a click if a button) really good if you just want a working tiled enviroment without the hassle of configuring hyprland
