It might depend on the distro, but were you running a 10 series or earlier? They dropped Pascal and earlier CPUs with the v590 driver, I know Arch migrated what the nvidia package installed in such a way that could leave someone without an appropriate driver unless they manually moved to a different source.

Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1prm8rl/archanno...