Nvidia 331.20 driver

For anyone considering updating to the newest nvidia driver, I would suggest against it. It seems to introduce some issues. Many have reported that they can no longer close the terminal by pressing ctrl-d or even typing exit. Ctrl-c to stop a running process in terminal also seem to no longer work.

I have also spotted a few zombies staying around when I run 'top' in terminal. This is also completely new after upgrading to 331.20 driver.

At the moment, I am still considering if I should downgrade (which is thankfully extremely easy on Arch) or if I'll just muddle through these issues until nvidia release new version that fix these issues.

Had it not been that newer nvidia cards have poor 3D acceleration on the nouveau driver, then I would have switched to nouveau a long time ago.

I downgraded to 325.15, I was beginning to notice more issues so I'll stick with 325.15 until these bugs are fixed. I strongly advise against the 331.20 nvidia driver.

That's one nice thing about Arch, I get to experience bugs in new versions before most other distros, haha.

It does not seem to affect everyone. This may be only a problem for laptop users for all I know, or maybe only certain models. There are currently two topics about this on Arch forums, some on nvidia forums, and I came across one on Fedora forums as well through some googling, and a bug report for gentoo.

Some seem to have a lot more serious issues than what I experience, like applications failing to start.

One thing I have spotted is that the cropping up of defunct processes seem to primarily affect xfce4 users, and everyone affected by this on the Arch forums have stated that downgrading to the previous nvidia driver fixes the problem. The worst cases I read about were some who were unable to start any display manager at all with the 331.20 driver.

Last I checked the nvidia forums, there was a dev there asking for more information from those who experienced some of the worst symptoms so they are at least looking into it.

Been going back to 331.20 and using it for several days now. It seems to vary quite a lot. On one boot, my computer was on for almost 48 hours, I played games and did a lot on it. The only problem I noticed was that my screensaver remained as a zombie. However, on another boot I had issues with the xfce4 terminal not closing with ctrl-d or when typing exit. So things appear to be very random, except for zombies appearing. Still, at most I've only seen 6 zombie processes at once.

Performance is great on these drivers, so I've decided to stick with it despite these minor issues.

Nvidia driver 331.38 is out now and all the little issues I experienced with 331.20 are all gone. Nvidia devs claimed to have fixed practically all the issues that was introduced in the last version, and so far things are looking good on my end.

Daerandin, as I told Booman on another thread a couple of days ago I installed Manjaro (Openbox)
on an older dual core.
I chose the non-free option on the live cd and Manjaro automatically downloaded and configured the Nvidia driver 331.20.

On this system everything works perfectly well.

On a side note, I am really impressed by this distro, installation, setup and use couldn't have been any simpler.

Yes I know the issues with 331.20 was not preset for everyone. Personally I only had a few minor annoyances. Firefox occasionally crashing when I wanted to download something, and defunct processes remaining over time. Now I have no issues.

Glad you like Manjaro. You should know that with Manjaro, you have full use of everything in the Arch Linux AUR, and that is quite a lot of packages. Manjaro wiki got some info on it.

I noticed Manjaro wiki recommend using yaourt to install from AUR, but I would suggest reading a bit further down on installing manually from AUR. This will give you better knowledge of how it works, and you can even customize the PKBUILD file if you so desire. For example, I edit the PKBUILD for xscreensaver-arch (xscreensaver with Arch logo) so that it does not require a display manager to build and install.

Thank you for the tips, I have no doubt Manjaro will remain on my system for a long time.
I will also install it on my main core7 PC, I think game performance, already very good (and sometimes absolutely great), will benefit from it.

If you want a challenge, a way to learn Linux a little better, Manjaro is NOT for you.

This distro takes care of everything, from installing the proprietary Nvidia driver to the multimedia codecs.
By the way, the graphical installer is a clone of Ubuntu's Ubiquity, so I felt right at home from the start.

The default Openbox configuration and the documentation is way better than Crunchbang's and of course the OS is blazingly fast.

From a guy like me used to Ubuntu and in general Debian-based distros, I was expecting having to learn a few things from an Arch Linux based OS, but so far I still have not yet touched the terminal simply because it was not necessary (not that I would have minded, I really like using it).

Of course Openbox is not the only option, you have also the KDE, XFCE and Minimal Net Editions.

I know you are super busy, but if you manage to find a little time, you can't go wrong with Manjaro.

Yes you can (no, I am not mimicking Obama's 2008 campaign).

To tell you the truth I wanted to use an USB drive, like I am now used to do, but Startup Disk creator is broken on Ubuntu 12.04 and the other alternative I am aware of, the Universal USB Installer, does not include Manjaro among the Linux distros list: I tried anyway, but it didn't work.

Booman, according to Clement Lefevbre, Mint's main developer, USB Image Writer should work.
Give it a try!