I thought I’ll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I’ll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

  •  Deconceptualist   ( @Deconceptualist@lemm.ee ) English
    5•6 months ago

    I’m running Endeavour OS (KDE Plasma) and ran into a weird issue with my graphics. It’s like windows sometimes flicker and flight with each other, some fullscreen videos won’t play and just lock to a gray screen instead (e.g. in Steam, though YouTube is oddly fine), and most 3D games are super choppy and unplayable.

    I’m not asking how to fix this, I just want to know how I start troubleshooting! I haven’t done anything special with my system, and I think the issue started after a normal pacman update. My GPU is a GeForce GTX 1060.

    Any suggestions to get started? I don’t even know if the issue is Nvidia drivers, X, window manager, KDE, etc.

    EDIT: The problem was Wayland. Fixed by logging in with X11 instead!

    •  Pizzasgood   ( @Pizzasgood@kbin.social ) 
      3•6 months ago

      Look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log for Xorg errors.

      Check if OpenGL is okay by running glxinfo (from the package mesa-utils) and checking in the first few lines for “direct rendering: Yes”.

      Check if Vulkan is okay by running vulkaninfo (from the package vulkan-tools) and seeing… if it throws errors at you, I guess. There are probably some specific things you could look for but I’m not familiar enough with Vulkan yet.

      You could sudo dmesg and read through looking for problems, but there might be a lot of noise to sift through. I’d start by piping it through grep -i nvidia to look for driver-specific stuff.

      Might be worth running nvidia-settings and poking around to see if anything seems amiss. Not sure what you’d actually be looking for, but yeah.

      Sometimes switching from linux and nvidia to linux-lts and nvidia-lts can help if the problem is in the kernel or driver. Remember to switch both of these at the same time, since drivers need to match the kernel.

      You could also try switching from the nvidia drivers to nouveau. Might offer temporary relief and help narrow down where the problem is, at the expense of probably worse performance in heavy games. Ought to be fine for 2D gaming and general desktopping.

      Trying a different window manager is always an option. Don’t know how much hassle that is when you use a full DE; I’ve always been the “just grab individual lightweight pieces and slap 'em together” sort so I don’t have any real experience with KDE. But yeah. Find out what the right way to change WM is for your system, then try swapping over to Openbox or something minimal like that and see what happens.

      Related to WM/DE, it could be an issue with the compositor maybe. Look up whatever KDE’s compositor is and see if you can turn it off and run a different one?

      •  Deconceptualist   ( @Deconceptualist@lemm.ee ) English
        2•6 months ago

        This looks super helpful, thanks!

        I’m a little nervous about swapping entirely over to nouveau for testing (well, moreso switching back) but I’m sure I can find a guide.

        Update: No need, the problem was just Wayland vs X11.

    •  cobra89   ( @cobra89@beehaw.org ) 
      1•6 months ago

      Do you have nvidia_drm.modeset=1 applied in your kernel parameters?

      I recently switched to an Nvidia card (I know I know, blame Plex they only support hardware encoding in Nvidia on Linux) and I had the same or a similar issue until I added the nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to the kernel boot parameters.

      https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA#DRM_kernel_mode_setting

      Make sure you do it via boot parameters and not mod probe because:

      the following option has to be added to the kernel command line in your boot files. Note that this specific parameter will have not have the correct effect if set in a file under /etc/modprobe.d, even if it’s included in the initramfs.