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
Pascal (GTX 10 series) and Volta (expensive workstation stuff) cards from 8-10 years ago are forced to 580 too. EDIT: and to be clear this is an issue with all of the
580xxversions of packages, specifically because Arch put them into the AUR (though this directly isn't OP's issue).Having a 1050Ti... I like the idea of an AMD (Polaris+) card, but I don't really want to buy a side-grade from the internet. I got really good deals on my other hardware (combo deals from 2019) so $100 more would actually be a decent chunk. Really just seems to me that the GPU market is behind due to crypto->NFTs->AI.
You might be right on FOSS drivers, but they seem to be still rough-around-the-edges whenever I look into it. In multiple aspects (performance, feature/technology support, segfaults). It might be true that I may not notice in some cases (lighter applications), though a 1050 Ti doesn't have the headroom where the performance could be cut in half and not result in noticeable instability.