I have an older gaming PC that has an Nvidia GTX 1060. Until I updated it to Kubuntu 26.04 and Plasma 6.6 it was working perfectly. Not exactly a powerhouse, for sure, but decent enough to play games like Horizon Zero Dawn at medium settings.
Since I’ve upgraded, it’s now in a situation where if the GPU is active, there’s no display, or I can use software rendering to get into the desktop, but the GPU can’t do anything. But not both. If I can get to the desktop and search journalctl for kwin_wayland_wrapper, I get an error along these lines:
kwin\_wayland\_wrapper\[2921]: kwin\_scene\_opengl: Error during eglInitialize "EGL\_NOT\_INITIALIZED"
The Nvidia driver is 580.142, which I’ve tried to roll back to a previous one to test if that’ll work, but apt tells me that 580 is literally the only driver available. I have also completely purged and reinstalled the driver, just in case it hadn’t installed properly, but that didn’t help.
Is it fair to say that my GPU is pretty much dead under the new drivers? And if so, will I have to reinstall, either with a previous version of Kubuntu, or more likely switch it across to Arch?
Sorry if there’s any info I’ve not included, I’ve kinda been picking about the internet, trying to figure out what’s gone wrong with it, and don’t really know where to start.
The trouble with Nvidia cards and Linux is that Nvidia decides to stop supplying the BLOB drivers at, seemingly, random. Obviously once that happens any hope of distros supporting that card with an Nvidia driver vanishes fairly rapidly. You may find the non-Nvidia driver works well enough, you may not.
Fundamentally it’s an NV problem, not a Linux one - I got caught out many moons ago with a truly ancient Quadro card.
You could argue that a distro should check your driver and refuse to install/update if it’s not going to be supported but that isn’t going to happen soon, or ever, because it’s not a distro problem it’s an NV one…
Yeah, Nvidia can eat it. But it’s my wife’s old machine, who’s a (mostly) happy Windows gamer who’s only ever had Nvidia and is broadly content with them. I don’t use it enough to justify spending much on it, but to get as much bang for my buck as I can from that particular motherboard/CPU, I’d still be looking at around £150 for an AMD GPU. It’s pretty much just a thing I tinker with because it’s there.
But a few days ago it was working perfectly fine, and now it isn’t, so I want to try to figure it out.
At a point where I’m almost certainly going to wipe Kubuntu and install Arch instead, where hopefully I can roll it back to a compatible driver.
The AMD GPU is worth it if you’re gonna be on Linux. Had Nvidia kick me in the dick 3 times in a row on my old machine. My new machine is all AMD, not a single problem. It just works.
I had the same card. Desktop usage was fine under X11. Gaming performance was pretty weak. Maybe things have changed since?