Wayland/NVidia status update on my machine

I’ve had no problems running GNOME and Wayland-native applications on Wayland and my NVidia card for the last…year?

XWayland, however, still has issues on this card. 2D apps are a bit laggy, but running 3D games? Slow, flickery, or both.

Which means I’m still logging into an X session to play Minecraft or anything from my Steam library.

I tried running Minecraft directly under Wayland over the weekend after installing the latest driver update, but it’s still not playable.

With Fedora planning to drop X entirely soon, I’m going to have to start thinking about what to do if the remaining compatibility issues aren’t fixed by the time F39 hits EOL.

  • Stay on an unsupported OS?
  • Switch to another distro?
  • Move all my games back to the Windows partition (just in time for Windows 10 EOL)?
  • Buy an AMD card…and a new motherboard that doesn’t have this one’s incompatibility with Radeon GPUs, and a new processor to go in the new board, and probably new RAM…

On the plus side, if I do that, I should be able to switch the rest of my Windows games over to Linux+Proton (except for bedrock Minecraft) and reclaim that space instead of staying on a soon to be EOL Windows version.

I think if I wasn’t already looking at buying a new laptop I’d be more inclined to upgrade multiple components at once.

I need to dig up my notes on what exactly was incompatible between this mobo and the Radeon GPU I tried to use a few years back, and whether I went with NVIDIA because the board conflicts with AMD GPUs in general, or because I just didn’t want to go through more rounds of compatibility testing. Or just redo the research from scratch. Assuming I can get a search engine to actually show matches for the specifics instead of what it thinks I should’ve asked for.

Argh…the only post I made about it was too vague, only mentioned that “Indications pointed to chipset compatibility problems with the mobo.” And I couldn’t find any notes on my computer about what chipset was likely to be the problem. No bookmarks either. The only thing I found was a reddit thread I’d saved to Pocket, which suggests that the ASMEDIA driver on the board for the SATA controller can interfere with AMD driver installation on Windows (one of the problems I had at the time), but switching it to IDE mode clears up the conflicts. Oddly enough, I ran into another issue with the ASMedia controller a year later, which involved Windows completely losing track of drives attached to that controller, which I solved by moving the cables over to the AMD controller instead.

It’s possible I saved the thread to Pocket because of the disappearing drives, but it’s also possible it’s the same underlying issue, and now that I don’t have anything attached to that controller, an AMD GPU will work properly on here. If so, that’s a much simpler (and cheaper) upgrade than swapping in a new mobo/cpu/ram combo at the same time.

Video card shuffle complete!

After getting the nice new card for the gaming PC, I was hoping to just shift everything downward, but its old card made my main desktop really unstable, and my desktop’s old card physically wouldn’t fit in the ancient box we have hooked up to the TV for media.

Old card is now doing Folding@home in the gaming PC. Medium card in my desktop has been replaced with a compatible one & I plan to sell it since it worked fine in the other box. Left the media box alone.

It’s weird, the Radeon card that was in the Windows 10 gaming PC worked great – no problems at all. I only took it out to get a more powerful one.

But when I moved it to my dual-boot system, it worked immediately on Linux, but it kept freezing Windows whenever I tried to update the driver or tools. And I’d get random crashes during games that had been totally stable on my old, less-powerful Nvidia.

Indications pointed to chipset compatibility problems with the mobo.

Between all the crashes and knowing that I couldn’t update the drivers, ever, it became clear I’d need to either replace the motherboard & hope that fixed it, or just replace the card. Back to the old one? Not after a month of awesome graphics performance! So I looked for a comparable Nvidia. Not as good (or expensive) as the shiny new one, but a lot better than the old one.

Once it arrived, I think I had everything working on both operating systems within 30 minutes.

Aaaargh! I was expecting trouble putting the AMD card in the dual boot system, but …

Aaaargh! I was expecting trouble putting the AMD card in the dual boot system, but I figured it would install fine on Windows and I’d have trouble on Linux, not the other way around

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It just worked in Linux. But while Windows was able to find a driver eventually, I’ve been unable to update the driver or install the AMD software without the machine freezing. Even in safe mode.

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Well, games I’ve tried so far seem to work ok without the extra software, so I’ll just stick with that for now

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