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.
I don’t recall what I was using, but after an update (on Mint) my drivers broke for an nvidia 3060. Worked fine one day, then dead the next. There was a mix of various driver versions, not sure what happened, maybe some aborted update, not sure.
I just ripped out all the drivers and reinstalled. On version 595.58 without issue. I can see 580.142 is also an option.
Try Nouveau, like Brickfrog said, if only to test the gpu.
I dont know if its the same but in Mint the Synaptic Package manager shows me all the versions of the nvidia driver supported by the kernel. Maybe you can downgrade your driver with it, although, I dont know how would you do that. Im just guessing but I think you would need to switch the transitional packages and those pull all the packages related to the driver.
Also, I’ve read a few times that distro upgrades can have weird problems and clean installs are better.
I had a similar situation yesterday, albeit not with 26.04, but the previous version. After a regular update it reverted to software rendering. What fixed it was selecting the non-open Nvidia driver with “sudo software-properties-qt”. Initially the options were greyed out, this was fixed by removing all old Nvidia drivers, and then “sudo ubuntu-drivers install”. The default open driver stopped working for some reason.
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…
I had the same card. Desktop usage was fine under X11. Gaming performance was pretty weak. Maybe things have changed since?
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.
On Debian the older Nvidia GPU would still work fine with the default Nouveau driver (open source non-Nvidia), I think(?) it’d be the same on Kubuntu/Ubuntu. Since it was an upgrade maybe you just need to re-enable Nouveau on your system? It’s not something I’ve ever done but doing a quick online search came up with some instructions here https://gist.github.com/vredchenko/42381e9cff3f1e162cb47cfd6479c459 , it looks more or less correct I’d just double-check before rebooting that Nouveau is not being blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d
You could try that & see how it goes before doing anything more drastic. You’re not going to do any heavy gaming with Nouveau but it should handle day-to-day tasks fine.
I’m using GTX980 on CachyOS with non open 580.142 driver which gets installed automatically if you are on an older Nvidia card, it works perfectly fine.
Nouveau driver crashes when anything more complex than a wallpaper is trying to render (literally, even context menus and taskbar icon names).
Did not try the open version.
Worth mentioning, Cachy and most other distros seem to use Nouveau in their live ISOs, so you’ll have to use nomodeset on Cachy and an alternative way to boot without GPU drivers on other distros.
I’ve got a 1060ti in my server, and anything above version 580.119.02 wouldn’t work. Apt won’t give you rollback versions as far as I know, you’ll need to grab a driver straight from Nvidia’s website
Yeah, apt only lets you roll back to what’s in the repos. Which repos and drivers are you using, OP?
UPDATE:
I gave up rolling around and around trying to repair Kubuntu and have been pondering a move away to another distro. So now it’s running Arch, and I even managed to retain /home.
…and the drivers still aren’t installing properly…
sigh
But I’m mostly putting it down to me not really knowing much about Arch and pacman and such, so my investigations will continue.
Nvidia can eat my entire arsehole though. If I could justify spending out on an AMD card I’d pull that 1060 and set the fucker on fire.
Maybe related, but I had a friend who had to disable secure boot to get some things to work with his Nvidia graphics card
I’m 99% certain that secure boot is already disabled on it, but I’ll check again.
