How-To: Hold Back a New NVIDIA Driver on Omarchy Until You’re Ready

With NVIDIA starting a new R620 branch, here’s how to keep a rolling Arch-based setup like Omarchy from jumping to it before you’ve read the notes.

1. See what’s coming

• pacman -Qu after a sync shows pending updates. Look for nvidia, nvidia-utils and lib32-nvidia-utils (or the -open variants)

2. Hold them for now

• In /etc/pacman.conf, add the driver packages to IgnorePkg, for example IgnorePkg = nvidia-open nvidia-utils lib32-nvidia-utils
• Keep the kernel module and userspace pieces on the same version. Mismatches are what break the desktop
• Don’t leave it forever. Partial upgrades on Arch cause their own problems, so remove the hold within a few days

3. Have a way back

• Old packages stay in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/. To roll back: sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/nvidia-utils-<old-version>*.pkg.tar.zst (and the matching driver)
• Take a filesystem snapshot before big updates if your setup supports it
• Keep a TTY login (Ctrl+Alt+F2) in mind in case Wayland won’t start

Review before you install: read the release notes yourself, back up your config, and try new versions somewhere you can afford to break first.

God Bless, and Use the Source!

References & Further Reading

• pacman (ArchWiki)
• Downgrading packages (ArchWiki)
• NVIDIA 620.70.06 Linux Driver Released (Phoronix)