On Monday 24 May 2021, Joe Kays wrote:

Dear Michael,

thank you for your reply, I totally did not know about the keeppackages option! It sounds like a great way to keep older NVIDIA driver versions as a backup. Does it survive a zypper clean (-a)?

I already knew the multikernel option, and that's how I managed to keep the 5.8 kernel, but unfortunately for some reason it won't boot anymore, that's kind of weird. I think installing an older kernels from the TW package history (http://download.opensuse.org/history/) is the way to go in this case.

So, all in all I think the problem could be easily solved with these 3 options: keeping old packages from the NVIDIA repo, setting up multikernel in the zypper config, and downgrading via package history in case multikernel somehow messes up.

Now the only open question for me is: How do I fix the current situation, where I don't have a cached version of the NVIDIA driver? Unfortunately it seems there is no such version history for the NVIDIA repository. Is there still some way to get my hands on an older version (preferably without having to do the installation 'the hard way')?

Thanks a lot! Joe

I haven't used it, but google reveals: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/linux-amd64-display-archive/ I guess they could be installed "the hard way". Michael