Okay I’m not surprised that C and Rust are popular, but I didn’t expect there to be so much Vala in there.

That was a lot of reading to learn that the two things were:

• He had some kind of problem with the laptop Wi-Fi driver on his new install of Ubuntu, and — pressed for time, away from home — decided that the best way to fix it was to reinstall Windows.

• He’s unwilling to give up games whose devs have chosen to make them impossible to play on Linux. It’s not clear which one he’s hooked on, but Apex Legends, to Fortnite and Valorant are mentioned.

Device drivers are not like other software in at least one important way: They have access to and depend on kernel internals which are not visible to applications, and they need to be rebuilt when those change. Something as huge and complicated as a GPU driver depends on quite a lot of them. The kernel does not provide a stable binary interface for drivers so they will frequently need to be recompiled to work with new versions of linux, and then less frequently the source code also needs modification as things are changed, added to, and improved.

This is not unique to Linux, it’s pretty normal. But it is a deliberate choice that its developers made, and people generally seem to think it was a good one.

Nouveau might be good enough by now for most games that will run on a 1060, maybe worth a try.

The driver needs to interface with the OS kernel which does change, so the driver needs updates. The old Nvidia driver is not open source or free software, so nobody other than Nvidia themselves can practically or legally do it. Nvidia could of course change that if they don’t want to do even the bare minimum of maintenance.

They started 9 years ago, but they remained popular into 2020 and according to wikipedia the last new pascal model was released in 2022. The 1080 and the 1060 are both still pretty high up on the Steam list of the most common GPUs.

Those are the GPUs they were selling — and a whole lot of people were buying — until about five years ago. Not something you’d expect to suddenly be unsupported. I guess Nvidia must be going broke or something, they can’t even afford to maintain their driver software any more.

… but it helps.