Hey all,

please tell me about your experience with modern Nvidia GPU’s and Wayland. Because mine is just terrible.

I have an RTX 3060 OC (12GB) and the card works very well on Windows and X11. My distribution is Fedora Linux 39 (KDE Plasma) with the rpmfusion repos enabled. I use Nvidia’s proprietary driver in its latest version from there, which is currently 545.29.06. Kernel 6.6.13. So it all seems very modern and up-to-date.

But everything comes crashing down when I try to use this GPU on Wayland. Yesterday I wanted to just watch a movie with mpv. After about 10 minutes, the screen started to flicker like an old CRT monitor running at a low refresh rate. I had to reboot to make it work again. Watched for another half hour or so and the screen just turned off and never turned back on again. Even switching to a console with Ctrl+F1 didn’t work, but the system was still running.

The console is full of Nvidia-related errors and I have a ton of graphical glitches when I open up VS Code, for example - only part of the application refreshes properly sometimes, it seems a bit like part of the UI rendering is just massively lagging behind.

Keep in mind that all of these problems go away as soon as I switch to X11 or Windows. Is it just me or are Nvidia’s drivers hot garbage and basically alpha software? I regret not going with an AMD card at this point. Even the Intel UHD620 in my notebook performs better than this.

Edit: I tried upgrading to the 550 beta driver now and it just segfaults in libnvidia-glcore.so when I try to run anything Wayland-related. Can’t even get to sddm with it anymore and have to start KDE from a TTY. Of course, xorg still works fine.