Tag: nvidia

Fedora 40, X and Wayland

Good to know:

1. #Fedora isn’t actually removing #Xorg support yet, just dropping it from the default installer.
2. They’ve pushed that change back from Fedora 40 to 41.

https://alternativeto.net/news/2024/3/fedora-workstation-41-to-phase-out-default-gnome-x-org-session-in-favor-of-wayland/

That means I have more time before I “need” to switch to an AMD card or to a distro that still has Xorg for #LinuxGaming. I can keep an alternate X-based session around until I have a better reason to replace the current #Nvidia card. Or who knows, maybe it’ll reach the point where XWayland windows run well enough on Nvidia that I won’t need an X11 session anymore.

(Desktop apps running directly on #Wayland run just fine on here, and judging by the fan speed, use less power than the same apps running on an X11 session of the same desktop.)

#

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.

Switching to Wayland with an NVidia GPU

Latest attempt to switch my desktop to Wayland with an NVidia GPU: So far, so good!

Gnome is just fine. Most of the desktop apps I’ve tried so far are fine. Minecraft runs well. I’ve spot-checked several Steam games and they’re working well.

The biggest issues I’ve found so far:

  • Some games trip the “not responding” checks during things like level loading.
  • Steam client is a bit laggy and wonky. (Apparently it doesn’t have direct Wayland support yet, and something’s not quiiite there with running it under XWayland.)

#

Notes to include in tech tips write-up:

– commenting the line in gdm.conf didn’t help

– Had to do this:

How to Enable Wayland for Hybrid NVIDIA Graphics on Fedora Linux 38 Workstation

“`
sudo cp -a /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules
“`

And comment out the TEST and IMPORT lines in the “Check if suspend/resume services necessary for working wayland support is available”

Because of this:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2128910

Apparently the tests are to work around a Wayland issue where manually-installed NVidia drivers need additional configuration for suspend/resume to work, but RPMFusion’s packages set up the needed config. Commenting them out should allow GDM to start a Wayland session.

Suspend and resume has worked at least once!

Also:

LXQt Wayland support project(for the pinetab): https://github.com/orgs/lxqt/projects/4/views/2

NVIDIA's RTX 4090 card has been getting so hot its *power cables have been …

NVIDIA's RTX 4090 card has been getting so hot its *power cables have been melting*! 😱

Apparently it's hard to tell whether the power adapter has actually snapped in, and if it's just a little bit off, it can come loose enough to overheat.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/18/23466974/nvidia-rtx-4090-power-cable-12vhpwr-melt-burn-plugged-in

#hardware #nvidia #weird #safety

On Wandering.shop

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.

Managed to sort out the problem with the PC that we were starting to think …

Managed to sort out the problem with the PC that we were starting to think we’d have to replace, so I don’t have to replace an entire PC!

Upgrading the video card in the main gaming box, though, and considering moving the old one over to the dual boot system. Looked up the current state of AMD vs. NVIDIA on Linux, and promptly found a flame war. *sigh*