This isn't a guide, just something i think may help. To install Steam on an Arch-based distro in most of the cases a simple sudo pacman -S steam will do just fine.
The installation will ask you to select a valid vulkan package from a list. And in most of the cases that's just fine... most of them.
Then you have your very "picky" old nvidia GPU which works only with a specific old nvidia driver and if you try to install anything else, there will be a conflict. Now you can try to remove the old (working) drivers and try your luck. But looking online i find a simple way to skip this passage and install Steam.
sudo pacman -S steam --assume-installed lib32-vulkan-driver
I gave up on my old 970 and switched to an AMD card (you don't even have to install the drivers for AMD GPUs, they're just baked into the Linux kernel).
Turns out, performance is degraded for GTX 9xx series cards on Linux in general. I'm glad I discovered that because otherwise, I'd have probably thought I still had a driver issue even if I had gotten it working.
I have a GTX 980 Ti, so this is interesting. After toying with Arch for the past few days, I'm considering switching to AMD in the near future.
This is funny because I recently retired my 750ti which I had been using for server work and it ran great with the latest Nvidia driver (although I heard they're gonna drop support soon and move the driver into a legacy package on rpmfusion).
The poor thing couldn't even do H.265, had 2 Gb of VRAM, and needed specially compiled libraries for pytorch/tensorflow stuff because CM 5.0 was over 10 years ago, but it chugged along just fine.
I'm personally still on a 1660ti because despite OpenCL's best efforts, CUDA has everyone by the balls, but now that I have a beefier server setup, I'll probably go with AMD on my next build.
Assuming I'll actually want to make a new build with these insane prices lol.
Soon? Support for Kepler was dropped years ago. Driver version 470 is the last one that supports the 700 series.
750 specifically was special because it was Maxwell architecture that Nvidia used on an "old" GPU brand line.
Hence the CM 5.0 instead of 3.0.
Mine was on the 580 something driver with CUDA 13.2 when I removed it from my server a couple of weeks ago.
Oh! That's cool then. 580 is the last version that supports Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta, latest is 595. But yeah there were still releases in the 580 driver branch as recently as last month. So that's cool.
I had a 750 years and years ago and had forgotten this. It felt like I was getting a kind of sleeper card at the time. Not that it was ever that powerful.