this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Buys an NVIDIA GPU, complains it doesn't work with Wayland. Classic.
buys an Nvidia GPU, complains
classic
I've never had issues with my nvidia gpu on wayland.
I've never had to tweak anything to get it to work, it just works, even on a fresh arch install. I don't get it.
I can't even get past my login screen without my monitors losing signal. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. It's a beast I have to tackle again before they drop x11
What distro? Fewer problems on Arch is to be expected as it has more up to date software and drivers. On something that is improving quickly, like Wayland, that can make a lot of difference.
Thanks for responding. I use Arch and tried both open and propietary driver for nvidia. I'm still learning the ins and outs of using Linux so even when I search for solutions, a lot of it just goes above my head, haha. I'm sure I'll figure it out (or the problem would fix itself) eventually.
Do you have a recent graphics card? How long is "never"?
nope it's a GTX 3050 mobile. so a few years old.
I had issues until about 18 month ago. I went from Wayland completely unusable with my 2080ti to it just works with plasma 6 I think.
Plasma 6 is much improved over 5 in terms of Wayland.
It literally went from .1 fps to workable across multiple monitors over night. I've had one issue since where an update broke multi monitor support where if I changed monitor input without first removing the monitor in display it hard locked my computer. After a couple weeks that was fixed. Now periodically I have to restart Steam sometimes after an Nvidia update sometimes a full system restart, but not always and that's still less restarts than the equivalent on Windows.
I've got a few friends that are considering a full jump, but a couple still play LoL or other anti cheat and aren't willing to jump ship yet. The fight is real and I'm still pushing though. I've been all one for 2+ years now and other than the pre plasma 6 days on kde, I've had one game that I had to tweak some settings for, Ghost of Tsushima didn't have multiplayer support, but the rest have been perfect out of box. For 90%+ of people, gaming and Linux will just work, regardless of GPU.
I also had some problems with my nvidia gpu around a year ago when I switched over to linux.
I'm not sure whether this was wayland specific, but when the GPU's clock speed would jump up after some time of inactivity it would cause this sort of stutter / lag for that 1 second of transition. Was really annoying, I had to change the minimum clock speed, it did help. I eventually switched to a AMD gpu and everything worked perfectly without me needing to do anything.
And in general I had a couple of more problems with some electron apps back then (Obsidian), that did not work well when forced to run wayland. Though this was probably not nvidia specific. Eventually I remember finding some sort of fix for it by setting some obscure environment variable that I found on hyprlands discord that was recently made available.
The only gpu i had problems with on fedora was a Intel B580. Both nvidia and amd worked just fine
I currently have two Wayland-running computers: one with Intel graphics and the other with Nvidia. While both work, one has some odd quirks. For instance, right-click window scaling doesn’t work at all and context menus vanish instantly unless I hold the mouse button down. Sometimes, the right-click menu simply doesn’t appear at all.
Incidentally, I’m currently looking for a used AMD graphics card. Can you guess which computer will get that card.
Oh, is that still a problem? I thought my GTX 1070TI was having problems in games because Debian ships quite old drivers. But if that happens on Arch, I guess I'm out of luck with that card for Linux 🥲
I dont know how old your card is, but NVIDIA only recently decided not to be complete gobshite on Linux and newer cards should be safer (from what I've read). AMD has been stable on linux for the last decade or so while NVIDIA (aka NOVIDIO) was a terrible actor on Linux and the community had to reverse engineer a lot of their stuff.
The 900 and 1000 series are the worst for Linux as neither Nouveau nor the new Nvidia drivers will ever properly support the cards...
Yeah, a common NVIDIA L.
I think 1070 is a problem with recent drivers as NVIDIA has dropped support in the proprietary drivers and noveau still does not support them well.
Some have said the 550 series drivers work best for these cards: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/gtx-1070-ubuntu-24-only-550-works/332234
Debian ships only 550 and it has flickering in all games. But at least for regular desktop work it is fine. Guess I'm stuck with Windows until the "AI" bubble pops
NVIDIA is still used by people. There shouldn’t be a push for Wayland if Wayland doesn’t work on hardware that majority of people use.
I myself am on full AMD hardware, yet won’t switch to Wayland unless there is an actual reason to do so. X works just fine for me.
The devs aren't anybody's lackeys either. Many are doing it for free in their own time. If you dont want Wayland, then support X11 with code, money, or documentation. If you don't support the X11 devs and maintainers, then you're making a decision to let it die and nobody's "forcing you" to use Wayland.
Developers can do whatever the hell they like with their own software and shouldn't let themselves be beholden to Nvidia.
Nvidia is being dragged kicking and screaming into using something that everyone else decided was the standard years ago, and that's a good thing.
Have fun with Xorg. I hope it works well for you forever. Truly.
I see no reason why hardware support should get any worse for you so no problems there. And it will be a while yet before most apps stop running on Xorg.
The 78 percent of us using Wayland don’t need updates though. Thanks.
right. I got an AMD and the driver is utter shit. I had to disable features using kernel cmdline bitmask flags, so that it doesn't crash every 2 hours. wayland + amd classic.
never had compositor or display server issues with nvidia on linux.
What GPU model is it? And what distro are you using?
Did you install separate AMD drivers? You’re generally not supposed to do that; it’s just plug-and-play in the kernel and MESA (assuming the version is new enough), and you usually don’t need to download separate drivers.
Also, what kernel flags did you have to use?
It’s just that I’m a bit skeptical any of this is actually the fault of the AMD Linux kernel driver, and I would guess there’s some underlying software or hardware issue like a faulty ACPI implementation on the motherboard. I’m not saying AMD can do no wrong, but in this case, making blanket statements about the quality of AMD GPU drivers may be premature.
rx 6650 xt, stock drivers that come with arch, amdgpu. issue is both on lts and latest. seems to be a ring buffer error. there's an open ticket about it.
I don't remeber the flag, but it's to disable some power saving feature.
That sounds more like something weird about the card itself than with the driver; "power saving feature" makes me think a faulty hardware ACPI implementation by the card vendor is to blame. I've had a similar thing happen with my Wi-Fi modem where it would completely crash and only a reboot would fix it; I too have to do special kernel options to get it working.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/4284
btw, happens with that bitmask too. just happened.
The author is Russian. That’s their culture after all.