This happens a lot in the same application’s code, let alone between two different pieces of software.

You wouldn’t believe how often I go in to fix something in an app I’ve built and end up breaking something else despite never directly touching that. Like I have a music player I built and I’ll go in to fix an issue affecting skips at the beginning of the song and when I go to test, I find that issue is fixed but now the whole app’s color scheme has changed or some other unrelated issue has appeared.

Code is very finicky and fragile and relies on specific conditions it expects. The removal of a space somewhere in the code can do a lot of damage you never thought possible. You think it’s just an empty space, who cares? Nope! The code is expecting that space and when it doesn’t see it, it throws a fit and shit breaks.

And when we’re talking about issues on the same system, these applications talk to the same things or each other enough that they have a similar effect. One application expects specific conditions and when it doesn’t find those, it spazzes out. Nvidia’s software was given explicit instructions on where it needs to go and what it needs to do. But if another application does something that interferes with those instructions, your Nvidia GPU will start acting up. The application unrelated to Nvidia wasn’t written by someone who is aware of what Nvidia is doing and so an issue appears. And then these developers work to figure out what happened and provide an update to fix.

You can see why you’ll have more issues the more software you add into your system that’s unrelated to each other.

It’s like hiring a bunch of professionals to work around your home but not explicitly telling them about each other. You hire a landscaper, an exterminator, a maid, a butler, a chef, a chauffeur, a contractor… and all of them come to your house on the same day every week. Each of them has a job to do and on your end, their jobs seem independent enough that they won’t be bumping into each other, but you forget about the little stuff that will cause interference. The maid wants to clean the living room, but your exterminator is chasing down a mouse right now and is gassing the living room. The maid starts working in there to clean up but doesn’t know about the gas and now she gets knocked unconscious and this causes the rest of your house to remain in a disorderly state. This is also not even taking into account any issues that can happen from one person that affect the whole home and everyone else indirectly like if the contractor was fixing the foundation but he uses dynamite and the whole house comes crashing down and now no one else is able to do anything.